Digital games are a wide, diverse and fast developing art form, and it is important to analyse games that are pushing the medium forward to see what design lessons can be learned. However, there are no established criteria to determine which games show these more progressive qualities.Grounded theory methodology was used to analyse language used in games reviews by critics of both 'core gamer' titles and those titles with more avant-garde properties. This showed there were two kinds of challenge being discussed -emotional and functional which appear to be, at least partially, mutually exclusive. Reviews of 'core' and 'avantgarde' games had different measures of purchase value, primary emotions, and modalities of language used to discuss the role of audiovisual qualities. Emotional challenge, ambiguity and solitude are suggested as useful devices for eliciting emotion from the player and for use in developing more 'avant-garde' games, as well as providing a basis for further lines of inquiry.
The nascent growth of video games has led to great leaps in technical understanding in how to create a functional and entertaining play experience. However, the complex, mixed-affect, eudaimonic entertainment experience that is possible when playing a video game—how it is formed, how it is experienced, and how to design for it—has been investigated far less than hedonistic emotional experiences focusing on fun, challenge, and “enjoyment.” Participants volunteered to be interviewed about their mixed-affect emotional experiences of playing avant-garde video games. New conceptions of agency emerged (actual, interpretive, fictional, mechanical) from the analysis of transcripts and were used to produce a framework of four categories of agency. This new framework offers designers and researchers the extra nuance in conversations around agency and contributes to the discussion of how we can design video games that allow for complex, reflective, eudaimonic emotional experiences.
Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) is a powerful way to develop theories where there is little existing research using a flexible but rigorous empirically-based approach. Although it originates from the fields of social and health sciences, it is a field-agnostic methodology that can be used in any discipline. However, it tends to be misunderstood by researchers within HCI. This paper sets out to explain what GTM is, how it can be useful to HCI researchers, and examples of how it has been misapplied. There is an overview of the decades of methodological debate that surrounds GTM, why it's important to be aware of this debate, and how GTM differs from other, better understood, qualitative methodologies. It is hoped the reader is left with a greater understanding of GTM, and better able to judge the results of research which claims to use GTM, but often does not. CCS Concepts• Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models.
Research on the emotional experience of playing videogames has increased in recent years, yet much of this work is focused on the hedonistic player experience (PX) commonly associated with the nebulous concept of 'fun' and positive affect. Researchers are increasingly paying more attention to the eudaimonic PX commonly associated with 'appreciation', mixed-affect and reflection. To further investigate eudaimonic PX we interviewed 24 games players about 'significant or memorable emotional experiences' from their games playing and used grounded theory to analyse their responses. This led to the construction of the concept of 'emotional exploration' which is used to help explain (i) why players would seek out a eudaimonic PX, (ii) how eudaimonic PX is constituted and (iii) how developers can design for a eudaimonic PX. We further make the case for the 'eudaimonic gameplay experience' to be realised as different and separate to pre-existing notions of eudaimonic entertainment.
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