Thinking and Doing: Challenge, Agency, and the Eudaimonic Experience in Video Games

Abstract

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.

“Whatever the Emotional Experience, It’s Up to Them”: Insights from Designers of Emotionally Impactful Games

“…To align with the designers' focus, future PX research ought to address players' unique interpretations of the games and how they afect players' emotional experiences. Our fndings related to players flling in the gaps in the story and creating their own interpretations of the game resemble the notion of interpretive fctional agency [17] and interpretive challenge [2], both of which have so far received scant attention in PX research. Hence, empirically exploring how players experience interpretive challenge and fctional interpretive agency may be an interesting avenue for future work.…”

“…Another aspect the designers were particularly interested in was whether the game leaves enough space for players to have a personal experience and interpretation. While several works have addressed the openness of interpretation in games [2,17,51], a tool to assess such experience has not yet been developed. A potential way to evaluate the space of interpretation may be to analyse the levels and topics of refection, along the lines of Mekler et al 's study [45].…”

“…Other researchers have started addressing how games provide, not necessarily emotional, but impactful and personal experiences. In a recent study, Cole and Gillies [17] suggested that games providing only a minimal outline of the story involve interpretive fctional agency, which encourages players to build their own understanding of the story and foster personally nuanced interpretation. Similarly, focusing on deep games, Rusch [51] discussed how cultivating vagueness with regards to, for example, the game's goal can inspire players to contemplate their own meaning of the game.…”

“…The inclusion criterion was that the participants have previously or are currently working on at least one game that involved prominent emotional aspects. Potential titles were chosen from a diverse pool of styles and genres based on the authors' personal experiences with the game, critics' and players' reviews, or video games discussed in previous literature on emotional challenge [8,16,17]. Participants were approached through personal inquiries, via game developer communities, and referrals from other participants.…”

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

“…Videogames have increasingly attained public recognition as a medium capable of artistic expression and emotional impact, as evidenced by museums like the Smithsonian dedicating exhibitions to "the art of video games" [72], the emergence of art games [67], and the critical acclaim that mainstream titles such as Journey [77] and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifce [50] have garnered for their 'Artistic Achievements' [10,11]. In turn, player experience (PX) research has become increasingly invested in exploring games' potential to emotionally move and perturb players [e.g., 3,13,14,29,60], challenge personal convictions [e.g., 5], and even change views and behavior in the outside world [e.g., 84] -responses that are traditionally associated with art [55,59,68]. Yet despite this growing body of work, scant attention has been paid to players' experience of games as art [cf.…”