At nearly every game conference I've attended, there is some speaker who invariably makes a plea to designers to focus on evoking new emotions in their games. Whether as a response to the lack of meaning in the speaker's recent gameplay experiences, or in an effort to justify that game design is an artform, emotion is held up as the holy grail that will lift us out of our nerd shackles and bring us to the game design promised land. I think they are on to something, however I find that I never walk away from these conferences with a concrete set of tools that will help me execute on creating emotional experiences in my own games. I've done a lot of thinking on the subject recently, and I'd like to change that.
In this and subsequent articles I will attempt to outline specific ways unique emotions can be evoked through studies of individual emotions and the mechanics that evoke them. My hope is that each article will provide some concrete mechanics that can be used as tools to help designers craft player experiences more intentionally. My first article on Trust can be found below. But first I'd like to take a brief detour to explain conceptually how I believe game mechanics lead to emotional responses in players.
Emotion through MeaningAs described in
Rules of Play by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen, through play, meaning can be evoked when a player interprets the feedback (stimulus) they receive as the result of a game action.
That meaning manifests in the player as a feeling we typically refer to as an emotion. For our purposes, it's helpful to think of
emotion as the shade and intensity to which the meaning created through play
resonates with the player. Shade implies
what a player is feeling, and the intensity defines the degree to which that emotion is felt. Emotional resonance is a topic for a post of its own, but there are a variety of factors which affect how much an emotion resonates (context, awareness, etc.). The definition isn't perfect (and is a little too clinical for my taste), but it helps frame some of the general variables we can use when designing mechanics to generate specific meaning.
We can see then that the Game Designer has a wedge to deliver emotional responses by generating meaning through designed mechanics (action/response sets). If the Game Designer can understand how the play the player experiences will be interpreted, then it is possible to understand what type of emotions will be evoked. In practice most meaningful play has a range of interpretations, which as a designer is a desirable outcome, as each emotional experience will belong uniquely to the player.
I hope that through studying mechanics and their interpretations, we can develop a set of concrete tools that can be repurposed to craft unique experiences for players. My first attempt linked below tackles some mechanics that can explore the trust emotion.
