A Cognitive Psychological Approach to Gameplay Emotions

Although emotions elicited by the fictional world or the artefact play a part in story-driven video games, they are certainly not the focus of the experience. From a cognitive psychological perspective, this paper studies the appraisal and action dimensions of emotions arising from gameplay. As it relies on cognitive film theories about popular narrative movies, it also revisits their conceptual sources in order to better reflect on the specificity of those gameplay emotions. Keywords emotion, gameplay, video game, film theory, appraisal, action tendency As David Freeman wrote at the beginning of Creating Emotion in Games: The Craft and Art of Emotioneering, the subject of emotion in games is a new continent and an almost unmapped one [4 : p. 8]. This is unquestionably true. However, though he considers the subject from a designer perspective, Freeman neither highlights emotions as a complex phenomenon, nor goes into thoroughly. While I’ll come back to this question later, for now I...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: DIGRA
• Authors: Bernard Perron
• Keywords: Cognitive Film Theories, Computer Graphics, DIGRA 2005, Emotion, Story-driven Video Games