Emotion and Mobile Gaming Experiences
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Emotional gaming - sounds strange. Emotion is one dimension of each activity and certainly one dimension of gaming. But those raising issues of emotional gaming do not question existing games to be emotional. They criticize the simplicity of emotions elicited by games today. They become bored by the repetition of certain game mechanics and implied emotions, for example, the challenges-to-overcome mechanics. They are not interested in supporting the one-directional way - games determine players' emotion - instead the other way round players' emotion determining the game. And they envision games evoking more complex emotions and a bi-directional relationship of games and players' emotion as, for example, in games like ICO, Façade, Cloud and Passage.
Instead of looking for strategies of future game design regarding emotion we are interested in deeper understanding emotions and their role for mobile game play today. What exactly is emotion in mobile gaming? Is there any role and if - what is the role of players' emotion from the perspective of the game mechanics? How do we design for emotion and the emotional dimension of mobile gaming experience? What is the particular nature of emotions elicited by physical movements of players?
Mobile games as we understand them today are based on the physical movement of the gamer within an augmented game world, combining physical, social and virtual reality. The research group Gangs of Bremen focuses on studying mobile gaming experiences by means of prototyping and play testing mobile games. The emotions in mobile games defined by the game designer and determined by the game mechanics might be simple. The emotions of the player emerging during game play must not be. Studying emergent game play we encountered differences between what we have designed for and what results during and within mobile play activity. Further, underlying the empirical difference we find two different concepts of emotion: emotion as a state of the player, foreseen, elicited and controlled by the game mechanics on the one hand and emotion as an unique phenomenon, emerging in situ on the other hand. In the first format emotion is accompanying cognition and goal-oriented action of the player. In the latter format emotion is an immediate bodily expression of a players feelings within the action context. To understand and to design for deeper gaming experiences we have to consider both dimensions of players' emotion.
Referent
Prof. Dr. Barbara Grüter