Abstract
How players experience games emotionally is the central question in this essay. The answer varies and depends on the game. Yet, most of the actions in games are goal-driven. Cognitive emotion theories propose that goal status appraisals and emotions are connected, and this connection is used to formulate how goal-driven engagement works in the games. For example, fear is implied when the player’s goal of keeping the player character alive is under threat. This goal-driven engagement is not enough to explain all the emotions involved in gameplay. Empathy, reacting emotionally to an emotional expression is a potential source of emotions in character-based games. As such, the visual beauty of the environment and character can be pleasurable. Lastly, sounds and music can modulate the emotions of the player. For example, loud and fast music tend to correlate with emotions with high arousal. The emotional experience of playing is an amalgam of these different sources. Importantly, the emotional experience is not straightforwardly caused by the game but it depends on the players’ appraisal of the situation in the game.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Tetris is a game in which differently shaped blocks fall until they hit the bottom. The player can rotate a falling block and move it sideways until it hits the bottom. If the blocks are placed on the bottom so, that there are no holes, the row(s) vanishes. The game ends if the pile of blocks reaches the top of the play area.
- 3.
Notably, Power and Dalgleish (1997) remarks that disgust is often confused with fear when a situation involved insects or reptiles (pp. 346–347).
- 4.
Psychological contamination can be something that is not digestive-based. Power and Dalghleish (Power and Dalgleish 1997, p. 345) refer to a questionnaire study in which people judged the idea of wearing Hitler’s sweater being a one of the most disgusting options.
- 5.
- 6.
The example in the figure is from a cut-scene, but the characters also show emotional expressions in the playable scenes.
- 7.
The players can also monitor the hearts, but I suspect that the facial expressions are easier.
- 8.
Using symmetry might be due to economic factors, as the symmetrical characters are easier and faster to model: one can create only the left or right half of the model and let the software create the other half (by mirroring the created half).
- 9.
The associative emotions here are analogous to the association of emotion and event in direct access route, see Sect. 2.2 above.
- 10.
Here, for the sake of simplicity, I use music to refer also to the static noise used in Silent Hill 3, as it is a composed piece for that function. I wish not to go deeper into the question whether the use of white noise in the game constitutes music or not (but if John Gage’s 4′33″ is accepted to be music, my shortcut is not a shortcut).
- 11.
Naturally, this applies only to those players who have been following the television series.
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Lankoski, P. (2012). Computer Games and Emotions. In: Sageng, J., Fossheim, H., Mandt Larsen, T. (eds) The Philosophy of Computer Games. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4249-9_4
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