The Influence Of Game Experience In Winning Conceptual Metaphor

Metaphor is an central way individuals know the world,and people expressed and understood abstract concepts through metaphor.With the development of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory,metaphorical attributes of abstract concepts have become a hot research topic in psychology.Winning or losing is a common abstract concept in daily life.The understanding of winning or losing affects the individual’s values,self-confidence and more aspects.At the linguistic and psychological level,the concept of victory or defeat is accompanied by the information of spatial location and color dimension,which provides the basis for the metaphorical construction of the concept of win-lose.Among them,spatial metaphor is based on body structure,and its cross-cultural consistency has been confirmed by a large number of studies;color metaphor is more likely influenced by social background and cultural tradition.Previous researches had explored specific dimensions of conceptual metaphor,and seldom discussed the mechanism of metaphor.With the popularity of games,individuals have more and more experience of winning and losing in the game experience.As a kind of acquired experience,will this special experience change the metaphorical connection among individuals?And then,abstract concepts has more than one metaphor representation,so is there a priority for metaphorical connection among multiple metaphors? What role does experience play in it?Therefore,this study uses vocabularies of win-lose as experimental material and takes players in a popular mobile game "Glory of Kings" as subjects.Through three experiments to explore the following questions:(1)under the background of Chinese culture,how the metaphor of spatial and color present the connection with the win-lose conceptions?(2)whether the influence of special experience will change the metaphorical connection of the individual?(3)whether the individual has preference in multi metaphorical dimension.In Experiment 1,the spatial cue task paradigm was used to confirm that the win-lose conceptual metaphor presented connection patterns of “win-up,lose-down”;in Experiment 2,using the Stroop paradigm to find that individuals’ color metaphors which presented win-red and lose-gray;but for game players,win connect blue and lose connect with red;in Experiment 3,the result showed that high experience group preferred color metaphors while low experience group chooses spatial metaphor.This study explores the metaphorical processing mechanisms of spatial metaphor and color metaphor of win-lose concepts,and attests the priority of metaphoric connection occurs in multiple metaphoric conditions,and further proves that metaphor preferences are affected by the degree of experience.