Influencing emotions in game design: theories and methods

Designing games is one thing — but designing emotions? This article reveals the main theories of emotional research and explains how game designers can apply this knowledge at work.

Player emotions can affect the perception of the game and the level of gameplay satisfactions, and they are a key aspect of the game experience. That’s why game designers should understand what causes emotions — and how to manipulate them. However, when working with emotions in game design, developers face a number of problems, since emotions are impossible to measure.

Hello everyone, my name is Mariya Aksyutina, and I’m a game designer at MY.GAMES. In this article, I’ll talk about how game designers can use knowledge about emotions at work, describe the main theories of emotional research and explain how to apply all this in practice.

Dealing with some terminology

First, why should game designers work with emotions at all?

Let’s take a look at the link between some definitions. Today, game designers often define a game in terms of constructing and living through some experience, and experience is a way of perceiving reality through an emotional lens. Therefore, there are no games that are not linked to emotions in some way, it just doesn’t exist..

Emotions are sensory manifestations that are triggered and expressed in the same way for all people, regardless of their gender, age, or the cultural context they live inside. They are an intense but brief physiological reaction to an external stimulus.

To date, scientists have identified 5 core emotions: anger, sadness, joy, fear, and disgust. Each provokes the release of hormones, and each is expressed in the same way by all people. Previously, the amount of identified emotions was later: 27, 12, and 8 emotions were identified, but the list continued to get thinner by the year. Therefore, an important note — within the psychological theories that systematize the approach to understanding emotions, (which we will reference during this article) the number of emotions will vary; this discrepancy only exists because these theories were described at different times.

A last note: in this article, we’ll specifically talk about working with emotions, not with feelings. Feelings are conscious experiences based on an understanding of the physical manifestations of emotions: a person’s knowledge of the world around them, their previous experiences, desires and needs — these are all superimposed on feelings. Feelings last over time and are more often directed to a subject. For example: “I’m afraid of this person” is a feeling, while “I’m scared” is an emotion.

Finding emotions in games

Actually locating emotions in a game is difficult because players experience them in a continuous cycle. To illustrate this, imagine, at the start of a game the player already has some emotional background, and under the influence of this background, they decide how they’ll play, receive feedback from the game in the form of changes in the system, and experience emotions again. This scheme corresponds to the standard emotional activation scheme, and it’s a natural process that is familiar to our brain.

Why is it hard for game designers to work with emotions? Because they have to go in the opposite direction: not trigger to emotion, but from an emotion to trigger; this process is complicated, because it’s unnatural.

Often, developers turn to the players for help and ask for feedback in text form — they use playtests, questionnaires, feedback analysis, and so on.

But there is a number of problems with feedback interpreting:

• Subjectivity. Emotions are subjective and individual, different players may interpret them differently.
• Lack of emotional language. Emotions are often difficult to put into words, and players may experience difficulties when trying to describe their emotional reactions, thus player feedback can be ambiguous or unclear.
• Variety of emotions. In games, users can experience a wide range of emotions, from joy and delight, to anger and frustration. Interpreting and managing such a variety of emotions can be a challenge for a game designer, especially when analyzing feedback from different players.
• Changing nature of emotions. Emotional reactions can change over time and in different game situations. Player feedback can be contextual and variable, requiring careful analysis and an understanding of the context in which emotions are expressed.

Developers can use various methods that involve the analysis of objects as systems, as well as modern psychological approaches to understanding emotions.The algorithm for working with emotions is the same as working on a project feature, because designing emotions is directly related to development:

1. Determine the emotions you want to convey to the player.
2. Match them with the game genre and player needs.
3. Select a place in the game that should evoke an emotion.
4. Determine what emotion arises at a particular moment.
5. Understand what emotion can compensate for the current state.
6. Add or customize existing mechanics.

Next, we’ll select a theory for each step that will facilitate our work and add more clarity.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Summary: Each person has five key needs, which can be represented in the form of a pyramid. A person’s motivation is determined by the satisfaction of their needs in a hierarchical order: needs lower down on the hierarchy must be satisfied before individuals can attend to higher needs. Here’s a detailed description of the theory.

Use: It can help us define basic emotions of the game or its player.

We often perceive games as rest, and this is true; but the choice of game will depend on what need the player wants to meet with this rest. Ask yourself: when players start my game, what will they expect to get? More often than not, these expectations are based on the genre or setting. Games are complex systems, so the answer will be mixed, and that’s okay.

Many games cover needs at different levels of the pyramid with the help of different mechanics. So, one explanation for Minecraft’s success is that the game covers all the levels of the pyramid at once, which means it suits everyone.

In addition, it’s important to remember that players not only expect a range of emotions from a game, they also want to find a safe place for their mind and take a break from their real world problems. Therefore, for each need, you can make a list of emotions that players want to experience and a list of what they don’t want to see, like this:

Robert Plutchik’s Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion

Summary: This theory understands emotions as evolutionary mechanisms, designed to ensure the best adaptation to external conditions and successful survival. Each emotion is a natural impulse that must be expressed. As per the theory, these mechanisms are driven by evolution and not controlled; they make us do things and react to external conditions.

Check out a detailed description here.

Use: This theory can help us select mechanisms for an emotional trigger. It’s convenient because it considers the display of emotion together with its motive or background, and a person’s reaction to it.

According to the theory, to live through an emotion, a person has to go through 5 stages:

• Stimulus: a change in the environment.
• Realization: a stimulus analysis and an initial conclusion regarding its nature.
• Emotion: a physiological brain response, hormone release.
• Reaction: an action an individual wants to perform.
• Expectation: an expected result of the performed action.

The first three stages of living through an emotion occur unconsciously because the brain reacts to a stimulant automatically, based on the player’s lived experience. But, the last two stages are a cognitive reaction that a player can control.

To obtain a full experience, a player has to go through an entire cycle of emotions in the game — but you should remember that the “shattering of expectations” is an inevitable process. Players will have to lose, otherwise the game won’t have any challenges. But if player expectations are always shattered, this will lead to emotional overstrain and, consequently, to frustration.

Designers should understand what changes in the environment cause a particular emotion — so let’s consider the cycle of living through each emotion separately.

Fear

Fear appears when we face something potentially dangerous. If you want to evoke this emotion, you need to understand that the frightening object must be recognizable as dangerous, and it must be implied that nothing can be done about this danger: a new enemy, an enemy that is many times stronger, dangerous changes in the physical space — all of these will push the player to flee from danger.

Anger

Anger appears when an object regarded as definitively dangerous can be “defeated”. (If the player has previously encountered a dangerous object and successfully analyzed its behavior, then such an object becomes an enemy that can be defeated.) The player will now head into battle. Objects that can cause anger include: enemies, destructible or manageable obstacles, a previously friendly object that stopped responding as per a previously tried scenario.

Joy

According to Plutchik, joy is the emotion of meeting a potential partner. We’ll modify this interpretation a little and regard joy as an emotion from acquiring a resource. Having acquired something unambiguously good, we want to possess it and increase the received benefit. Joy can come from obtaining in-game resources, gaining online friends, or establishing friendships with NPCs.

Sadness

On the opposite side of the spectrum as joy, sadness is an emotion caused by the loss of a resource. In life, we often associate sadness with apathy and inaction, but evolutionarily it’s one of the most powerful incentives for action — without sadness there would be no motivation.

There are many ways to take resources from players. For instance, even buying the coolest sword can cause fleeting sadness due to the loss of a large number of coins. The main thing is to remember that a player who has lost something will expect that loss can be made up.

Trust

Trust is built from a long-term and friendly relationship with someone. All social and cooperative games work with this emotion. But you shouldn’t take this emotion’s triggers literally — people also tend to humanize the objects they interact with. So, a properly working tool will also evoke trust: the player performs certain actions, and according to some “agreement” with the tool, will get the expected result.

Disgust

Disgust is designed to save us from coming into contact with dangerous objects, even if they don’t pose an active threat. It appears during passive contact, that is, when the initiative is in the hands of the person. Often, disgusting objects are used as elements of level design, to mark areas where the player doesn’t need to go.

Expectation and Surprise

Expectation

Surprise

Expectation and surprise are two emotions with very similar triggers; the only difference is that expectation is associated with exploration of territories, and surprise with exploration of objects. These are bright, positive emotions that motivate us to search for resources. It’s important to remember that for these emotions to manifest in full force, the environment must signal safety, otherwise fear will manifest.

The theory of emotion by Kellerman and Plutchik

Summary: Emotions can be systematized depending on the intensity of their impact on the nervous system. For convenience, the researchers presented all emotions in the form of a diagram, which shows emotions (bright manifestations) in the center, and less intense states at a distance from the center.

Emotions have polar opposites:

• grief — ecstasy
• amazement — vigilance
• terror — rage
• admiration — loathing

Read a full description of the theory here.

Use: Adjustment of emotions in a game

As we said earlier, a person can experience many emotions simultaneously, turning them into feelings. This diagram will just help us predict what feelings the player will develop in some specific in-game situations.

Let’s take a look. This diagram resembles a color wheel, and the brighter the color of a fragment, the brighter the emotion. At the ends of the “petals”, the intensity subsides, and beyond, is an empty emotionless space. The game designer’s task is to lead the player out of the empty space outside the petals into the field of bright emotions.

For example, let’s consider a standard situation: in a mobile F2P game, a user sees a pop-up window with an offer. The sudden interruption of gameplay and the appearance of an “obstacle” causes anger. But the offer is great and suits our player — this causes joy.

Let’s mix these emotions like colors on a palette and we’ll see that the player will probably experience anticipation before opening the offer. So, the joy experienced from the chance to increase resource levels outweighs the anger from interrupted gameplay.

But if the contents of the offer are unfamiliar or unclear to the player, then we would see a completely different picture; the mixture of anger and boredom will make the player feel contempt.

Conclusion

From a practical point of view, designing emotions is a complex and little-studied area of game design; it cannot be measured and translated into metrics. This article provides a few tools that can help with, but of course, a game designer’s expertise remains the main development wind vane.

It’s also important to remember that, as with any field, engineering emotions requires a balance. There’s no limit to the amount of emotions we can evoke in a game, but we have to consider a player’s emotional load — the player isn’t supposed to be emotionally high or low through the experience; neutral gameplay is also welcome at times.