“Horror, guilt and shame” – Uncomfortable Experiences in Digital Games

Gameplay 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, there has been little empirical investigation into how discomfort manifests during play and its impact on engagement. We conducted a qualitative investigation using an online survey (N=95), that focused on uncomfortable interactions across three games: Darkest Dungeon, Fallout 4 and Papers, Please. The findings suggest games create discomfort in a variety of ways; through providing high-pressure environments with uncertain outcomes and difficult decisions to make, to the experience of loss and exposing players to disturbing themes. However, while excessive discomfort can jeopardize player engagement, the findings also indicate that discomfort can provide another facet to gameplay, leading to richer forms of experience and stimulating wider reflections on societal issues and concerns

“One of the baddies all along” : Moments that challenge a player’s perspective

Reflection has become a core interest for game designers. However, empirical research into the kinds and causes for reflection within games is scarce. We therefore conducted an online questionnaire where participants (n=101) openly reported perspective-challenging moments within games, their causes, experience, and impact. Where past work has emphasised transformative reflection that changes player’s views and behaviour outside the game, we found that players report predominantly moments of ‘endo’-transformative reflection, which is focused on players’ game-related behaviour and concepts. We further identify some causes of perspective-challenging moments relating to narrative, game systems, game-external sources, and player expectations. Narrative reveals emerge as a key cause of perspective challenge

Thinking and Doing: Challenge, Agency, and the Eudaimonic Experience in Video Games

The nascent growth of videogames has led to great leaps in technical understanding in how to create a functional and entertaining play experience. However, the complex, mixed-affect, eudaimonic entertainment experience that is possible when playing a video game—how it is formed, how it is experienced and how to design for it, has been investigated far less than hedonistic emotional experiences focusing on fun, challenge and ‘enjoyment.’ Participants volunteered to be interviewed about their mixed-affect emotional experiences of playing avant-garde videogames. New conceptions of agency emerged (Actual, Interpretive, Fictional, Mechanical) from the analysis of transcripts and were used to produce a framework of four categories of agency. This new framework offers designers and researchers the extra nuance in conversations around agency, and contributes to the discussion of how we can design video games that allow for complex, reflective, eudaimonic emotional experiences

Some Games You Just Can’t Win: Crowdfunded Memorialisation, Grief and That Dragon, Cancer

January 2016 saw the final release of Numinous Games’ crowdfunded linear adventure game That Dragon, Cancer. An impactful independent title which subverts many of gaming’s traditional and valued norms. In less than two hours of abstracted adventure, players are transported through a series of vignettes documenting one family’s struggle with cancer, and the battle faced by their terminally ill child, Joel. Digital memorialisation has been documented by scholars since the late 1990s. This has come in the form of sites specifically created for memorialisation, social networking sites repurposed by their users for memorialisation (MySpace and more recently Facebook), and online virtual worlds (Second Life and World of Warcraft). However, within That Dragon, Cancer the productive nature of grief has created and envisioned a gaming experience purpose-built for memorialisation. This chapter begins by documenting memorialisation within virtual environments. From here, the author turns to consider the way in which That Dragon, Cancer provides a purpose-built space for grief, memorialisation and understanding, focussing on key stylistic and mechanic-based decisions undertaken in the games design. Finally, the author considers the way in which That Dragon, Cancer, through the use of crowdfunding in late 2014, transformed from a project memorialising one child to the memorialisation of many across the globe