ABSTRACT
Emotions are key to the player experience (PX) and interest in the potential of games to provide unique emotional, sometimes uncomfortable experiences is growing. Yet there has been little empirical investigation of what game experiences players consider emotionally moving, their causes and effects, and whether players find these experiences rewarding at all. We analyzed 121 players' accounts of emotionally moving game experiences in terms of the feelings and thoughts they evoked, different PX constructs, as well as game-related and personal factors contributing to these. We found that most players enjoyed and appreciated experiencing negatively valenced emotions, such as sadness. Emotions were evoked by a variety of interactive and non-interactive game aspects, such as in-game loss, character attachment and (lack of) agency, but also personal memories, and were often accompanied by (self-)reflection. Our findings highlight the potential of games to provide emotionally rewarding and thought-provoking experiences, as well as outline opportunities for future research and design of such experiences. They also showcase that negative affect may contribute to enjoyment, thereby extending our notion of positive player experience.
Supplemental Material
Available for Download
pn1051-file4.zip
- Fraser Allison, Marcus Carter, and Martin Gibbs. 2015. Good Frustrations: The Paradoxical Pleasure of Fearing Death in DayZ. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction. ACM, 119--123. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Anne Bartsch. 2012. Emotional gratification in entertainment experience. Why viewers of movies and television series find it rewarding to experience emotions. Media Psychology 15, 3 (2012), 267--302.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Anne Bartsch, Anja Kalch, and Mary Beth Oliver. 2014. Moved to think: The role of emotional media experiences in stimulating reflective thoughts. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications 26, 3 (2014), 125--140.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Chris Bateman, Rebecca Lowenhaupt, and Lennart E Nacke. 2011. Player typology in theory and practice. In Proceedings of DiGRA.Google Scholar
- Steve Benford, Chris Greenhalgh, Gabriella Giannachi, Brendan Walker, Joe Marshall, and Tom Rodden. 2012. Uncomfortable interactions. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2005--2014. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Max V. Birk, Ioanna Iacovides, Daniel Johnson, and Regan Mandryk. 2015. The False Dichotomy between Positive and Negative Affect in Game Play. In CHI PLAY '15. ACM, 799--804. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Julia Ayumi Bopp, Elisa D Mekler, and Klaus Opwis. 2015. It Was Sad But Still Good: Gratifications of Emotionally Moving Game Experiences. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 1193--1198. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Emily Brown and Paul Cairns. 2004. A grounded investigation of game immersion. In CHI'04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 1297--1300. Google ScholarDigital Library
- James Brown, Kathrin Gerling, Patrick Dickinson, Ben Kirman, and others. 2015. Dead fun: uncomfortable interactions in a virtual reality game for coffins. In CHI PLAY '15. ACM, 475--480. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kaitlyn Burnell. 2012. Breaking the Rules of Game Design: when to go against Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. In Game Developers Conference. http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015398/ Breaking-the-Rules-of-GameGoogle Scholar
- Tom Cole, Paul Cairns, and Marco Gillies. 2015. Emotional and Functional Challenge in Core and Avant-garde Games. In CHI PLAY '15. ACM, 121--126. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gerald C Cupchik. 2011. The Role of Feeling in the Entertainment= Emotion Formula. Journal of Media Psychology 23, 1 (2011), 6--11.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sebastian Deterding. 2015. The Joys of Absence: Emotion, Emotion Display, and Interaction Tension in Video Game Play. In Proc. FDG '15.Google Scholar
- Alf Gabrielsson and Siv Lindstrom Wik. 2003. Strong Experiences Related to Music: A descriptive System. Musicae scientiae 7, 2 (2003), 157--217.Google Scholar
- Sabine Harrer. 2013. From Losing to Loss: Exploring the Expressive Capacities of Videogames Beyond Death as Failure. Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research 5, 4 (2013), 607--620.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ioanna Iacovides and Anna L Cox. 2015. Moving Beyond Fun: Evaluating Serious Experience in Digital Games. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2245--2254. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jeroen Jansz. 2005. The emotional appeal of violent video games for adolescent males. Communication Theory 15, 3 (2005), 219--241.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Daniel Johnson, Lennart Nacke, and Peta Wyeth. 2015. All about that base: differing player experiences in video game genres and the unique case of MOBA games. In CHI '15. ACM, 2265--2274. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniel Kahneman and Jason Riis. 2005. Living, and thinking about it: Two perspectives on life. The science of well-being (2005), 285--304.Google Scholar
- Nicole Lazzaro. 2009. Why we play: affect and the fun of games. Human-Computer Interaction: Designing for Diverse Users and Domains (2009), 155--176.Google Scholar
- Teresa Lynch and Nicole Martins. 2015. Nothing to Fear? An Analysis of College Students' Fear Experiences With Video Games. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59, 2 (2015), 298--317.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Filipa Madeira, Patrficia Arriaga, Joana Adriao, Ricardo Lopes, Francisco Esteves, and others. 2013. Emotional Gaming. (2013), 11--29.Google Scholar
- Tim Marsh and Brigid Costello. 2012. Experience in serious games: between positive and serious experience. In Serious Games Development and Applications. Springer, 255--267. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Elisa D Mekler, Julia Ayumi Bopp, Alexandre N Tuch, and Klaus Opwis. 2014. A systematic review of quantitative studies on the enjoyment of digital entertainment games. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 927--936. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Markus Montola. 2010. The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-Playing. In Proc. Nordic DiGRA.Google Scholar
- Mary Beth Oliver and Anne Bartsch. 2010. Appreciation as audience response: Exploring entertainment gratifications beyond hedonism. Human Communication Research 36, 1 (2010), 53--81.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mary Beth Oliver, Nicholas David Bowman, Julia K Woolley, Ryan Rogers, Brett I Sherrick, and Mun-Young Chung. 2015. Video Games as Meaningful Entertainment Experiences. Psychology of Popular Media Culture (2015).Google Scholar
- Mary Beth Oliver and Arthur A Raney. 2011. Entertainment as pleasurable and meaningful: Identifying hedonic and eudaimonic motivations for entertainment consumption. Journal of Communication 61, 5 (2011), 984--1004.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Richard M Ryan, C Scott Rigby, and Andrew Przybylski. 2006. The motivational pull of video games: A self-determination theory approach. Motivation and emotion 30, 4 (2006), 344--360.Google Scholar
- Jose Luis Gonzalez Sanchez, Francisco Luis Gutierrez Vela, Francisco Montero Simarro, and Natalia Padilla-Zea. 2012. Playability: analysing user experience in video games. Behaviour & Information Technology 31, 10 (2012), 1033--1054. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ian Graham Ronald Shaw and Barney Warf. 2009. Worlds of affect: Virtual geographies of video games. Environment and planning. A 41, 6 (2009), 1332--1343.Google Scholar
- Sharon T Steinemann, Elisa D Mekler, and Klaus Opwis. 2015. Increasing Donating Behavior Through a Game for Change: The Role of Interactivity and Appreciation. In CHI PLAY '15. ACM, 319--329. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eduard Sioe-Hao Tan. 2008. Entertainment is emotion: The functional architecture of the entertainment experience. Media psychology 11, 1 (2008), 28--51.Google Scholar
- Kellie Vella, Daniel Johnson, and Leanne Hides. 2013. Positively playful: when videogames lead to player wellbeing. In First International Conference on Gameful Design, Research and Applications. ACM, 99--102. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Douglas Wilson and Miguel Sicart. 2010. Now it's personal: on abusive game design. In Proc. FuturePlay 2010. ACM, 40--47. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Negative Emotion, Positive Experience?: Emotionally Moving Moments in Digital Games
Recommendations
"Horror, guilt and shame" -- Uncomfortable Experiences in Digital Games
CHI PLAY '19: Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in PlayGameplay frequently involves a combination of positive and negative emotions, where there is increasing interest in how to design for more complex forms of player experience. However, despite the risk that some of these experiences may be uncomfortable, ...
“An Odd Kind of Pleasure”: Differentiating Emotional Challenge in Digital Games
CHI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsRecent work introduced the notion of emotional challenge as a means to afford more unique and diverse gaming experiences. However, players' experience of emotional challenge has received little empirical attention. It remains unclear whether players ...
The False Dichotomy between Positive and Negative Affect in Game Play
CHI PLAY '15: Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in PlayMost of the time games make us happy, but sometimes they are frustrating or make us feel sad. They allow us to experience pleasure, success and joy, but they can also yield feelings of frustration, failure, or sorrow from darker themes. In games, we can ...
Comments