Full paper · 2021

"Whatever the Emotional Experience, It's Up to Them": Insights from Designers of Emotionally Impactful Games

Denisova, A., Bopp, J. A., Nguyen, T. D., & Mekler, E. D.

ConferenceCORE conference ranking: CORE A*Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'21), 2021

Four themes from interviews with 14 indie designers: design vision, creating room for interpretation, experiential fine-tuning, and the gap for player experience research. — Open full-size image

In short

Research on emotionally impactful games has mostly studied players. We interviewed 14 indie game designers about their values and practices when creating emotionally impactful games.

In games

Games whose designers we interviewed

In the paper

What Remains of Edith Finch

2017

Its designer wanted to put players “into a situation that forces them to be more conscious than they would be in a normal life experience”.
In the paper

Gone Home

2013

A story about family, discovered by exploring an empty house.
In the paper

Old Man's Journey

2017

A wordless story of memory and regret, told through landscapes the player reshapes.
In the paper

Among the Sleep

2014

A horror game played from the perspective of a two-year-old.

How the study worked

Participants: 14 of the 39 game designers approached, all working on at least one game that involved prominent emotional aspects
Games: Gone Home, Among the Sleep, The Longing, Before I Forget, Austen Translation, What Remains of Edith Finch, Old Man’s Journey, 11-11 Memories Retold, Temporality, Dialogue: A Writer’s Story, Elemental Flow, Knights & Bikes and Doki Doki Literature Club
Interviews: 5 by video conference, 7 by email and 2 by instant messenger, each lasting approximately one hour; approximately 40,000 words in total
Analysis: Reflexive, inductive thematic analysis

Three themes

Design vision: impact players on a personal level
Gameplay: creating room for experience
Experiential fine-tuning

In designers’ words

An experience of utter loneliness
The Longing, on the intended feeling
We needed lighter moments of triumph and joviality in the story, as well as the sadder moments, as it’s hard to truly appreciate one without the other
11-11 Memories Retold
A table, and there is a microscope, and a knife, and a chipmunk on a table. Where does your eye go? What do you think about that possibility space?
What Remains of Edith Finch, on testing in a non-interactive setting
Look at the picture [from the game] and talk about what they are seeing. And after they were done, we would let them retell the story of what happened
Old Man’s Journey, on playtesting

Key findings

Designers usually have a clear emotional impact in mind, but want to leave room for players' own experiences and interpretations.
Despite this, players were rarely involved in evaluating the emotional experience before or during production.
We identify gaps between design practice and player experience research, and ways research could better support designers.

What this means for designers and researchers

Simple gameplay mechanics are not always indicative of emotionally impactful games.
Discussion
Gameplay difficulty and emotional experiences may be in a more granular, multi-dimensional relationship, rather than a strict dichotomy.
Discussion
A possible starting point may lie in the techniques mentioned by our participants using pictures and non-interactive versions of the game, to adapt and refine them to focus on the emotional experiences.
On evaluating emotional experiences with early prototypes
Several participants stated to draw out the emotional trajectory of the game in the early production phase using applications, such as spreadsheets.
Discussion
Researchers and designers do not share a common vocabulary.
Limitations and future work

Read and cite

PDF (accepted version) Publisher's version (DOI)

APA citation

Denisova, A., Bopp, J. A., Nguyen, T. D., & Mekler, E. D. (2021, May). "Whatever the Emotional Experience, It's Up to Them": Insights from Designers of Emotionally Impactful Games. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'21) (pp. 1-9).