Video games afford a range of different experiences
with some having a profound emotional impact on their players.
In recent years, interest in these experiences has grown in HCI games research. However, this
research does not account for how game designers should cater for such experiences. And so, we
presently lack an understanding of how designers of such games approach and perceive their work.
Understanding designers’ professional practices is essential to developing theories and tools
that support the design and evaluation of games with rich emotional content.
In this work, we set out to explore 3 questions: (1) What do designers of emotionally impactful
games focus on? (2) What challenges do they encounter in their work? (3) And to what extent
does existing HCI games work align with their practices? This knowledge may help identify and,
eventually, bridge the gap between research and practice and steer the field towards more
impactful player experience research.
indie game industry professionals who had worked on commercially-released games known
for their emotional impact. We selected titles from a diverse pool of styles and genres and
we also aimed to include perspectives from a diverse sample of participants.
The first major theme we identified revolves around the design vision: Designers first and
foremost wanted their games to impact players on a personal level. Typically, they had a clear vision
for the emotional experiences they intended to evoke. To achieve this, some designers started off
by mapping out “the emotional flow of each level” or created a spreadsheet with specific emotions
and their intensities that the players were expected to feel at different points in the game.
In some cases, designers wanted to afford experiences that leave the
player with something to think about, without actually specifying what “something” may be.
The designers also noted that they appreciate when players report experiences other than the
ones originally intended by them. To allow players to create unique personal experiences, designers
took a range of different approaches. For instance, providing a purposefully vague ending
could encourage players to arrive at their own interpretation about what happens in the game.
The next theme is about “creating room for experience”. It refers to setting the stage
for the intended experiences and the different approaches for doing that. Creating room for
experience sometimes meant providing plenty of space within the game for the players to
play-around with each other, without being marched through a story that they have no control over.
Others created room for players by letting them piece together information by themselves
and build up conflict in their head rather than being explicitly presented with it in the game.
Another approach was to deliberately remove or lower the gameplay difficulty. This was done to
allow players to focus on their internal thoughts and feelings without being distracted
by the gameplay aspects that were considered less important. That said, player actively experiencing
the game first hand was seen essential for the experience to be impactful, to enhance
the felt emotions, and to encourage empathy.
which refers to the involvement of players in the different stages of the game creation process.
Player experience plays a significant role in the development of emotionally impactful games
with the designers shaping and attending to the intended experiences throughout the whole process.
When testing parts of the game early on, the designers mainly focused on evaluating if
their players understood what was happening in the game with less focus on evaluating the emotional
involvement of players, which was instead done closer to the completion of the game.
Designers typically gathered these insights from players through interviews and observations,
although evaluation of emotional experiences was not always perceived as straightforward. For
instance, emotional reactions like fear were seen as easy to test for, but other experiences like
“how ‘mysterious’ something seems” to the player were seen as much more challenging to assess.
Emotional fine-tuning was particularly difficult when no similar games existed to compare to
and to give comfort as to what would be considered the right balance.
The interviews we conducted allowed us to gain a better understanding of the intentions
of designers of emotionally impactful games and the challenges they encounter in their
work. But more importantly, we revealed an existing gap between PX research and practice,
particularly with regards to the mismatch between the focus on how specific emotions are created in
PX literature and the designers’ vision of leaving experiences and interpretations to the players.
This opens up new avenues for future work that can help narrow this gap down.
We list these in our paper. One such suggestion is to explore the role of interpretive and fictional
agency and interpretive challenge in shaping players’ unique interpretations of games.