Negative Emotion, Positive Experience?: Emotionally Moving Moments in
Digital Games
Players' Motivations in Games
/
Bopp, Julia Ayumi
/
Mekler, Elisa D.
/
Opwis, Klaus
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2016-05-07
v.1
p.2996-3006
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: Emotions are key to the player experience (PX) and interest in the potential
of games to provide unique emotional, sometimes uncomfortable experiences is
growing. Yet there has been little empirical investigation of what game
experiences players consider emotionally moving, their causes and effects, and
whether players find these experiences rewarding at all. We analyzed 121
players' accounts of emotionally moving game experiences in terms of the
feelings and thoughts they evoked, different PX constructs, as well as
game-related and personal factors contributing to these. We found that most
players enjoyed and appreciated experiencing negatively valenced emotions, such
as sadness. Emotions were evoked by a variety of interactive and
non-interactive game aspects, such as in-game loss, character attachment and
(lack of) agency, but also personal memories, and were often accompanied by
(self-)reflection. Our findings highlight the potential of games to provide
emotionally rewarding and thought-provoking experiences, as well as outline
opportunities for future research and design of such experiences. They also
showcase that negative affect may contribute to enjoyment, thereby extending
our notion of positive player experience.