”My Soul Got a Little Bit Cleaner”: Art Experience in Videogames

Abstract

Videogames receive increasing acclaim as a medium capable of artistic expression, emotional resonance, and even transformative potential. Yet while discussions concerning the status of games as art have a long history in games research, little is known about the player experience (PX) of games as art, their emotional characteristics, and what impact they may have on players. Drawing from Empirical Aesthetics, we surveyed 174 people about whether they had an art experience with videogames and what emotions they experienced. Our findings showcase the prominence of epistemic emotions for videogame art experiences, beyond the negative and mixed emotional responses previously examined, as well as the range of personal impacts such experiences may have. These findings are consistent with art experience phenomena characteristic of other art forms. Moreover, we discuss how our study relates to prior research on emotions and reflection in PX, the importance of games' representational qualities in art experiences, and identify lines of further inquiry. All data, study materials, and analyses are available at https://osf.io/ryvt6/?view_only=965fa2fd34dc4f728685fe865f09b446

Neural Language Models as What If? -Engines for HCI Research

“…Table 2: An example of eliciting fictional experience recalls using GPT-3. The last researcher question is from Bopp et al [2,3]. For comparison, we also include an example answer from their real human data.…”

“…Example human response to the same question [2,3]: It was absolutely beautiful. The game I'm thinking of is Journey.…”

“…100 continuations for the prompt in Table 2. The prompt is adapted from Bopp et al [3] who also published a dataset of real human responses [2]. We used two versions of the prompt, one ending simply with "Participant:" and other with "Participant: I'm thinking of the game", the latter motivated by the tendency of more specific prompts to yield more higher quality continuations.…”

“Deeper gaming”: A literature review and research agenda on eudaimonia in digital games research.

“…Despite the variety of games that were studied in the reviewed records, there are some less studied types of games, including sports or race games, platform games, and indie games. Especially the latter game type is surprising, given that prior research showed the importance of eudaimonia-related emotional experiences to indie game developers (Denisova et al, 2021) and indie games are often related to more artistic, avant-garde narratives, mechanics, and audiovisual elements that can be linked to eudaimonia (Bopp et al, 2021). For example, the indie game Fragile Equilibrium portrays depression and anxiety through abstract, experiential game design in order to provoke emotional resonance which, in turn, builds appreciation and can lead to self-reflection as well as meaning and eudaimonic gratification (Phelps et al, 2020).…”

Explaining the formation of eudaimonic gaming experiences: a theoretical overview and systemization based on interactivity and game elements

“…Finally, we can see scholarship into the aesthetics of gameplay as relevant to the elicitation of eudaimonic experiences. For example, Bopp et al (2021) discussed how players can have artistic experiences from playing games using insights from empirical aesthetics (see Tinio and Smith, 2014), which led to several emotional and eudaimonic reactions, including feelings of beauty, awe, feeling moved, and nostalgia. Possler and Klimmt (2023) also theorized how the aesthetics of games lead to eudaimonic experiences.…”