Negative Emotion, Positive Experience?

Bopp, Julia Ayumi; Mekler, Elisa D.; Opwis, Klaus

doi:10.1145/2858036.2858227

Cited by 124 publications

(88 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…In contrast to prior work on emotionally moving moments [4] or emotional challenge in games [5], asking players to share 'uncomfortable' experiences led to responses that primarily focused on strong negative emotions that each game had elicited. It would seem that what differentiates a negative emotion from an uncomfortable one is (1) the intensity of the experience and (2) the fact that is does not co-occur with or immediately lead to a positive emotion.…”

Section: How Do Negative Emotions Relate To Discomfort?mentioning

confidence: 75%

“…Another avenue of research that provides insight into player discomfort is related to the concept of emotional challenge [12]. While Bopp and colleagues [5] found the primary negative emotion for conventional forms of challenge was frustration, in contrast, emotional challenges were mainly associated with sadness, fear and tension. These emotions primarily resulted from having to deal with difficult themes (e.g., death, illness, torture) and engaging with difficult ingame decisions (e.g., having to choose between options with unclear consequences).…”

Section: Negative Emotions In Player Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…While the literature indicates that players often value negative emotional experiences [5,12,22], and may be able to distance themselves by pointing out 'it's just a game' [31], there is still much we do not understand about the nature of the discomfort experienced in games. While emotionally moving moments in games [4] and emotional challenges [5] often involve negative emotions, these may not all be experienced as uncomfortable. As suggested by Bopp and colleagues [4], there is a need for an explicit focus on uncomfortable forms of player experience, to find out more about what causes discomfort in games and the emotions associated with it.…”

Section: The Value Of Discomfortmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Instead, we selected Papers, Please as an alternative since it is a well-received game (with 'overwhelming positive' reviews on Steam) that also addresses serious issues (immigration and authoritarianism) but in a less shocking way. The game is also frequently discussed in literature [e.g., 5,12,15].…”

Section: The Final Setmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Within the area of games and HCI, there has been a recent shift towards understanding more complex forms of player experience, such as investigating the interplay between positive and negative emotion [4], and exploring the concept of emotional challenge [5,12]. In addition, a growing number of commercial games are exposing players to difficult themes, such as alcoholism and abuse e.g., Papo & Yo [G6], and the morality of killing e.g., Spec Ops: The Line [G11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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"Horror, guilt and shame" -- Uncomfortable Experiences in Digital Games

Gowler

Iacovides

2019

Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play

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Gameplay frequently involves a combination of positive and negative emotions, where there is increasing interest in how to design for more complex forms of player experience. However, despite the risk that some of these experiences may be uncomfortable, there has been little empirical investigation into how discomfort manifests during play and its impact on engagement. We conducted a qualitative investigation using an online survey (N=95), that focused on uncomfortable interactions across three games: Darkest Dungeon, Fallout 4 and Papers, Please. The findings suggest games create discomfort in a variety of ways; through providing high-pressure environments with uncertain outcomes and difficult decisions to make, to the experience of loss and exposing players to disturbing themes. However, while excessive discomfort can jeopardize player engagement, the findings also indicate that discomfort can provide another facet to gameplay, leading to richer forms of experience and stimulating wider reflections on societal issues and concerns.

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Section: How Do Negative Emotions Relate To Discomfort?mentioning

confidence: 75%

Section: Negative Emotions In Player Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Value Of Discomfortmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Final Setmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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"Horror, guilt and shame" -- Uncomfortable Experiences in Digital Games

Gowler

Iacovides

2019

Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play

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Synthesizing affective virtual reality multicharacter experiences

Mazumdar

Mousas

2021

Computer Animation & Virtual

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This article presents a methodology for automatically synthesizing a virtual population (pedestrians placed in a virtual environment) that impacts a user with a specified affective experience. The pipeline began by developing a dataset of behaviors that could be assigned to virtual characters. Next, an annotation phase assigned affective responses of participants to each character's behavior. The design considerations of our affective multicharacter virtual reality experience were then encoded to cost terms and assigned to a total cost function. This method allowed the developer to control the priority and the targets of the cost terms, and given the user inputs, our application could optimize the multicharacter experience using a Markov chain Monte Carlo method known as simulated annealing. A user study was conducted to investigate whether our method could synthesize virtual reality multicharacter experiences that affect participants in an expected way. The results of our study showed that the three different synthesized multicharacter experiences (low, medium, and high negative affect) were perceived as expected by participants; therefore, we argue that we can indeed automatically synthesize virtual reality multicharacter experiences that impact participants' affect levels in an expected way. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.

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Effects of Higher Interactivity on the Interactive Narrative Experience: An Experimental Study

Gapiuk

Estupiñán

Szilas

2019

Interactive Storytelling

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This article reports a study with the purpose of analyzing the Interactive Narrative Experience under different levels of interactivity: a "classic" Interactive Narrative constructed with a branching story structure, and a "generative" Interactive Narrative built on a narrative engine that integrates techniques of Artificial Intelligence. Three elements of the user experience, namely control, curiosity, and frustration were compared and examined based on the experiment with 30 participants who played one of two versions of the narrative.

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Negative Emotion, Positive Experience?

Cited by 124 publications

References 28 publications

"Horror, guilt and shame" -- Uncomfortable Experiences in Digital Games

"Horror, guilt and shame" -- Uncomfortable Experiences in Digital Games

Synthesizing affective virtual reality multicharacter experiences

Effects of Higher Interactivity on the Interactive Narrative Experience: An Experimental Study

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