Insights From Designers Of Emotionally Impactful Games-Denisova

This note last modified March 4, 2024

#notesFromPaper Year : Tags : #reflectiveGames Authors: Denisova Bopp Nguyen Mekler

“The interviews began with a brief about the research project, followed by the questions about the participant’s motivations to create the game in question, the potential inspiration for the idea, and a discussion of the intended experiences or feelings that the designers aimed to evoke in their players. This lead up to the discussion of the approaches they took to deliver the idea to the players and the practices they followed to evoke the feelings and experiences intended. The third part of the interview was about challenge: we asked designers whether they considered their game as challenging, and what the main challenges were for their players in the game. The interview concluded with a discussion about the suitability of the medium for delivering the aforementioned ideas and experiences to the audience.”

  • Developers had a clear vision for the feelings they intended to evoke
    • The goal is making these feelings personally impactful.
  • Developers often added purposefully vague endings.
    • Players often have their own interpretations.
  • Balance happy and sad emotions
  • Openness to space and experience
    • But developers still asked the players what they thought the experience was about, so that they could ensure the right idea would come across.
  • Decrease difficulty
  • Early testing ignores “I like this” and “I didn’t like this”. It ignores the emotional experience and focuses on understanding if players understood what was happening.
    • The emotional experience often isn’t complete at the start of the game.

Gaps in research:

  • PX focuses on creating specific emotions, but developers often want to leave this to the players.
    • PX should focus on how players interpret and meaning-make in games.
    • Apparently future work can be done in interpretive fictional agency and interpretive challenge, see the paper for links to other papers.
  • Talks about ambiguity, which is certainty about multiple possibilities (as opposed to uncertainly, which is simply not knowing)
    • Different people may desire firm answers to questions, or may be attracted to ambiguity.
  • Potential tools:
    • to envision and tailor the emotional trajectory.
    • To analyze levels and topics of reflection.
    • To analyze whether players are cycling through questioning, hypothesizing, and interpretation.
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