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论游戏设计中的映像情绪和原始情绪

发布时间:2011-08-18 00:21:30 Tags:,,,,

作者:Danc(游戏设计师,现任Spry Fox公司创意总监)

并非所有情绪生来就平等。

思考:阅读到描写母亲将不久于人世的章节,读者悲伤的情绪涌上心头;自己的母亲病危在床而无法抑止忧伤的蔓延,这两种感觉显然是不同的。前者是一种虚无的反射,我们本能地知道那不是一种真实的凶兆。后者是一种伴随着生命发展的、自然的、原始的情感。

我已经看过相关的术语,所以冒着雷同的风险,我们采用以下标签进行说明。

映像情绪(Shadow emotions):这种情绪的产生与故事、艺术和其他无真实危险的唤起型刺激物有关。

原始情绪(Primary emotions):当我们所处的情境具有真实可感的影响时,我们就会产生这种情绪。

我所见识过最接近以上概念的是“身体印记理论”(Somatic Marker Theory)。它的基本主张如下:

“当我们做决定时,我们必须利用认知和情绪过程评估选择的诱因价值。当我们面对复杂而矛盾的选择时,我们无法单靠认知过程做决定,且过度刺激的的认知过程本身也无法帮我们决断。

在这种情况下,身体印记可以帮助我们做决定。身体印记是介于强化诱发相关生理情感状态的刺激物们之间的结合体。”

这个理论的关键在于,确定了两类相异的情绪。第一类是紧密对应原始情绪的“体循环”;第二类是呼应映像情绪的“类体循环”。

毫无疑问,这是一个值得好好研究的课题。所以如果哪位学过神经学的人能够提出更准确的分类和相关模型,我乐意修正本文。

这两类情绪的区别看似很学术,但我对游戏激发原始情绪的能力非常着迷。游戏激发情绪的方式对于更加反射性的媒体而言,就算不是不可能,也是相当困难的。作为游戏设计师,我可以且已经将玩家置于体验真实损失的境地。而最引人入胜的电影能做到的不过是激发遭遇损失的映像。

primary-emotions(from fineartamerica.com)

primary-emotions(from fineartamerica.com)

关于记忆与情绪的简要思考

要描述映像情绪的机制,了解一点背景知识是必要的。我们就从记忆与情绪之间的联系开始吧。

记忆往往会影响判断。在一定程度上,记忆的真正功能已经被“数据存储”这个现代化的概念污染了。也许,“教训”更适合解读“记忆”。每一份记忆都贴上了若干个情绪标签。面对某种刺激时,如果我们唤醒了与之相关的记忆,它就会告诉我们如何应对当前的刺激。当你看见人行道上蹲坐着一条狗,你会本能地将它与你现存的思维模式和以往见过的狗的记忆相比较。在这种认知基本活动中,你几乎立即产生某种情绪。如果印像中的狗比较善良可爱,现在你可能觉得舒服和欢喜;如果你回想起的狗是“龇牙咧嘴”的,你也许会感到焦虑袭身。一刹那,你非常清楚你对那条狗的印像。

认为情绪是一种早期的、认知的专门形式,是因为它服务于生存的功能。你经常做决定,但你没有时间思考。你能想到的有:快点!就是现在!此时此刻,你的脑子里灌满情绪的信号。你奔跑、攻击、团结、威胁或踌躇,都是因为这种强烈的、原始的、高效的情绪。与记忆相捆绑的情绪唤醒了数十年的经验,然后将其转化为瞬间的本能反应。

更复杂的认知从容地进行某类决定,这种拖延造成了失败,失败又必然要付出代价,所以要有一触即发的情绪避免损失。如果你受到狼攻击,你不可能还可以谨慎地分析如何对犬科动物进行分类。之后的数秒或数小时,你对处境的意识性理解才开始生效,然后缓和情绪上的反应。更经常的情况是,我们所认为的意识,仅仅是对我们急转直变的情绪作辩解。

情绪是必需的,但并没有受教化。我们很容易就能铭记在最困难时刻遭遇的教训。有些孩子小时候受到“本地霸王”的欺负,要生存就只能奋起反击;孩子成年后,又惨遭老板“穿小鞋”,这时他如果采取相同的反抗形式,那他的麻烦就大了。之所以管理情绪会这么棘手,是因为会触发情绪的情形往往在我们意识到之前就发生了。按照经验教训,我们的情绪迅速转变成一种下意识的行动(游戏邦注:但有时候也可能没有采取行动)。

演绎情绪性情景的叙事方式

你不可能轻易地或有意识地停止完全激活的情绪;然而,你可以提前训练。方法之一是,借助安全的叙述、声音和意象媒介,测试和探索我们的情绪。激发安全的情绪反应的机制,主要是以移情和情绪性记忆的混合体为基础。

刺激物:当我们看到或想到某个唤起情绪的故事或场面。

记忆:我们挖掘储藏在脑海里的相关记忆。

合成:我们把不同的元素组合为连贯的整体。

移情:我们模拟在特定情况下的感觉。

有意识的理解:我们处理从安全距离中生成的安全情绪。

现在想像一下,你看到一条狗蹲坐在人行道上。你非常清楚它不会伤害你,因此你焦虑的情绪舒缓了。然后你激活你的移情活动,最后模拟情绪(假设你那条狗真的在你面前,你会作何感想)。现在你酝酿着情绪并感受它,从多个角度审视它。你本能地融入这种情节中。你不必从狗身边飞也似地逃开了,这种想法让你舒服多了。通过记忆这种校正过的印像,你稍微缓和了未来“见狗”的情绪反应。

从生物学的角度看,这实在是一种太过划算的情绪缓和练习。你不必将自己放到可能有致命的危险的情境中,而只需坐在椅子上好好想想。这种训练虽不完美,但我认为有一定效果。大量实验研究表现了如何通过心理反应的加工和认知标签的运用来区分情绪。如果你可以练习给肾上腺贴上勇敢而不是恐惧的标签,你大约能够克服面对现实情形时产生的情绪吧。

尽管这个理论绝对不是坚不可催,但它至少可以表明,许多流行的科幻小说和艺术品都高度关注激发情绪和强度的剧情链。呼唤型艺术作品往往能表现出危险的、昂贵的或社交中的情形,所以我们得以在安全的形式下练习那些情形。

映像情绪

消耗和模拟呼唤型刺激物能产生相对安全的情绪,也就是我所谓的映像情绪。

映像情绪绝不是虚假的情绪。你的心率增加、手心出汗——过往的情形唤醒了你的真实情绪,你的身体随之作出反应——生理特征的出现就是证明。然而,你理智地知道它是一种能小心控制的实验。

人类生来就对模拟与现实有着不可思议的敏锐理解,所以我们识别出它只是一种模拟体验之后,就可以放下心将其搁置一边了。

映像情绪也并非绝对安全的。回想强烈的情绪是一种紧张、甚至可怕的经历——有过创伤治疗经历的人会认同这个观点。你的模拟实验离最初事件的时间越接近,你的情绪反应就越激烈。

以上理论已经成为强化戏剧和艺术表现的常见手法。以下列表虽不全面,但对激发映像情绪有兴趣的人可以将其作为实用的参考工具:

大量描述突出的刺激物

夸大刺激物

层叠多重刺激渠道

瞄准普遍存在的情绪触发物(游戏邦注:例如爱、死亡、胜利等等)

创造连贯的情景和因果的链条,以促进模拟实验

拟人化刺激物,以便更好地配合个人的情绪经历。

作为艺术家、小说家和游戏设计师,这些我都用过了,不少都能推测出来,所以就没那么神秘了。适当地运用这些技巧,可以增加召唤的映像情绪的强度。“召唤”这个词是关键,因为我们更关心的是运用信号去激发已存在的情绪。同样地,我认为这些技巧主要运用于简化处理我们的唤起型信息的方式或增加信号强度的方式。

真人快打(from gogaminggiant.com)

真人快打(from gogaminggiant.com)

映像情绪当然存在于游戏中。事实上,游戏业斥巨资试图确保高端游戏机游戏唤起映像情绪的效果,使像电影或书籍等媒体一样出色。技术狂人鼓吹视觉沉浸、现实主义和游戏作为主要的叙述媒体的支配地位,在他们统治的黑暗时代,千名受缚的技术人员英勇地担负起激发强烈映像情绪的重任。这终于让我们见识到巴洛克般奢华的创作,例如《真人快打》、《战神》或《L.A. Noire》等游戏。这种昂贵的事业仍将继续,因为人类渴望将映像情绪作为通向更有效的情绪认知的道路。游戏开发商受到经济利益刺激,也会主动去填补这种需求。

下次你安全地体验射击恐怖分子的快感时,看着渲染得非常华丽的血液和脑浆喷出的慢镜头,并退一步考虑你正在模拟的情形。这显然不是真实的,但你确实有所触动。也许这些镜头还有益健康。这些是活动的映像情绪。我没有被感动,但也许如果我们以更高的分辨率渲染这些脑壳残片,有朝一日,AAA游戏将抵达意义更深刻的阶段。

原始情绪

在奢侈地追求映像情绪的过程中,我们有时候可能会遗失对更深层现象的探索,这种现像是游戏能够激发情绪的基本原理。

我耗费了大半天时间观察游戏玩家。有些是其他人的观察结果,但还有我自己做的、针对游戏或原型的反应的分离式观察。我看到了不同的情绪在活动——如果他们不明白某种关卡布局,玩家可能会觉得受挫。或者如果玩家的角色永久阵亡(《Realm of the Mad God》),他们可能会感到悲伤。或者,如果他们刚好碰上一个长条方块把四排方块全消了(《俄罗斯方块》),他们可能禁不住兴高采烈。

我可以大胆(但可能没有根据)地断言,这些反应与过去的经历并无关联,看似源自更原始的思维循环。那么哪里才是情绪的源头?并非所有情绪都是记忆的回声。从无到有创造记忆的方法也是存在的。

你历经数个小时创建起来的角色“永垂不朽”,目睹此景会让人痛心疾首。这种永远死亡的系统还没在现代游戏中普及,但每天都有成千上百名玩家“阵亡”在《Realm of the Mad God》这款游戏中。设计者可以从纯机制的角度看待这种体验。玩家投入时间和精力去积累资源和技能。然后很大程度上因为技术失误,玩家中弹,所有时间、一切精力,全都在枪林弹雨中付诸东流。

Realm of the Mad God(from wildshadow)

Realm of the Mad God(from wildshadow)

尽管知道这只是无情的系统属性,玩家仍然感到彻骨的悲痛。这是一种像流淌在静脉中的血液一样自然、原始的情感,足以让人感到窒息般的难过。这种情绪毫无玩笑或冷淡的成分。损失的大小和新旧直接关联到体验的强度。大多数玩家很难释怀第一次巨大损失,却还强装淡定。有些人最终无法承受,只能离开游戏。

有趣的是,这种情绪反应也出现在其他非游戏的场景里。最近,我忘了保存一份文件,结果若干小时的努力成果就在该死的一瞬间灰飞烟灭。自责感和失去感非常相似。更极端的例子是,大萧条时期的股市崩溃,所有财富在一夜之间化为泡沫,有些人的情绪反应太过激烈,最终选择从高楼飞身坠落。情绪的系统性产物是一种惊人的现象。

一定程度上存在差异但同样可重现的情绪存在几种变化。如果玩家因为延时或故障或自认为受其他玩家所害而引起角色死亡,玩家的情绪反应几乎总是处于炽热的阶段。对因果机制系统的小规模调整会导致明显的情绪反应。

不同于由唤起型刺激物引发的阴影情绪,原始情绪的出现归功于交互式情境。原始情绪往往涉及以下几个有效的机制因素:

领土

时间

资源

信息

投入和损失

技能和随机

社交互动

以上列表看似所有游戏的基本原素。是的,我们可以简单地认为游戏是与情绪处于同一范畴的系统。没必要重复唤起型媒体的烂比喻了。作为游戏开发者,我们确实不需要映像情绪的支撑,把“游戏做得像游戏”就可以成功地为玩家创造出有意义的情绪体验。

我希望我可以多说一些关于产生原始情绪的生物学过程,可惜这不是我的专业。现在我能做的就是描述我用来激发许多玩家正面原始情绪的实用过程。对比一下我在映像情绪部分列出的方法——这部分内容相当不同吧。

定义:创造描述以玩家为中心的价值系统的机制和模型。玩家应该关注什么,系统和资源如何强化玩家的兴奋感?

适应:通过与价值结构重复产生相互作用,使玩家适应该价值结构。请特别注意技能和资源的获得及社交关系的形成,因为这些设定必须不断发展成熟。

触发:将玩家直接置于实际的损失或收获的情境中,触发新的原始情绪。

你当然可以在这个过程中运用唤起型刺激物,但它只能充当辅助工具。情绪源于玩家与系统之间的交互作用和体验,不是连续用图片、对话或声音轰击别人就能激发的。情绪与玩家的选择、失败、学习及技能和游戏本身都有关系。

我的朋友Stephane Bura对游戏系统映射情绪做了非常重要的研究,但还远远不够。我强烈推荐你阅读他的原创文章《Emotion Engineering in Games》。要完全理解这个课题需要花上几年的功夫,但我希望你有一个良好的开端。

结论

从原始情绪和映像情绪的差异研究中,我收获了大量实用的价值。只要你吸收了这些概念,就可以看着游戏并清楚地提问:“这名玩家的情绪是怎么产生的?”一旦你理清这种机制,你可以继续增加或弱化观察到的效果。你是该增加视觉反馈的精度或还是纯地改变资源变量?如果你既不知道情绪的类型,也不理解驱使情绪的机制,那么你的设计就太盲目了。

游戏如何产生原始情绪,这是另一个重点。国际象棋中的胜利感是真实的。《反恐精英》中的危机感是真实而本能的。当你被邀请加入某个公会,这种归属感会伴随你的余生。我们不是在反思或移情(尽管可以同时发生)。因为游戏的交互式属性和我们采用游戏价值结构的能力,影响的真实性足以在我们的身体内激发出真实的情绪。这是游戏令人惊叹的基本性质,是其他传统媒体力所不及的特点。让我们继续发挥自己的强项吧。

与其浪费时间纠缠于“英雄之旅”和传统唤起型叙事方式,不如好好探索情绪性游戏设计的无边领域。我们做游戏,游戏自有其伟大的力量。如果你抛弃所有对映像情绪的依赖,将设计工作的重点置于创造玩家的原始情绪,结果又会怎么样呢?

在《Realm of the Mad God》中,玩家死了,永不复生——这是对失败的严酷惩罚。与8×8像素的子弹对撞,没有精度,没有现实,也没有精制的剧情,这意味着某些情绪性的东西,这是任何电影或小说都不能捕获的情感。(本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译,如需转载请联系:游戏邦

Shadow Emotions and Primary Emotions

by Danc

Not all emotions are created equal.

Consider: It is a distinctly different thing to feel sad while reading about a dying mother than to actually feel sad because your mother is dying. The former is a shadowy reflection that we intuitively understand is not immediately threatening. The later is raw, primary and life changing.

I’ve yet to see existing terminology for this phenomena, so at the risk of stepping on existing toes, let’s use the following labels.

Shadow emotions:  The emotions we feel when partaking in narratives, art and other safely evocative stimuli
Primary emotions: The emotions we feel when we are in a situation with real perceived consequences.
The closest I’ve seen to this being described elsewhere is something called the Somatic Marker Theory.  It postulates:

“When we make decisions, we must assess the incentive value of the choices available to us, using cognitive and emotional processes. When we face complex and conflicting choices, we may be unable to decide using only cognitive processes, which may become overloaded and unable to help us decide. In these cases (and others), somatic markers can help us decide. Somatic markers are associations between reinforcing stimuli that induce an associated physiological affective state.”

Crucially, the theory identify two distinct classes of emotion.  The first is the ‘body loop’ which corresponds closely to primary emotions.  The second is the ‘as-if body loop’ which corresponds to shadow emotions.

No doubt this is a well studied topic, so if someone educated in the neurosciences is able to provide even more accurate labels or links to additional models I’ll happily amend this essay.

The distinction between these two classes of emotion may seem academic, but I find myself fascinated by a game’s ability to provoke primary emotions in a manner that is difficult if not impossible for more reflective forms of media.  As a game designer, I can and have put the player in situation where they experience real loss.

The best a movie or book can manage is evoking a shadow of loss.

Brief thoughts on memory and emotion

A small bit of background is necessary to describe the mechanism of shadow emotions.   It starts with the link between memory and emotion.

Memories come loaded with judgments.  In some sense, the true function of memory has been polluted by a modern concept of coldly analytic ‘data storage’.   Perhaps a better term for ‘memory’ is ‘lesson’.  Each memory has deeply integrated emotional tags that informs us of how we might want to react if we call upon that memory in relation to our current stimuli.   When you see a dog sitting on the sidewalk, you instinctively compare it to your existing mental models and memories of past dogs.

In that basic act of cognition, you nearly instantly become awash with emotions.  Perhaps you feel a sense of comfort and fondness.  Or perhaps a wave of anxiety passes through you as you recall the sharp teeth of past encounters gone awry.  In a split second, you know exactly how you feel about that dog.

One way of thinking of emotion as an early specialized form of cognition that serves a clear survival function. Quite often you need to make a decision, but you don’t have time to think about. Quick! Act now! At this moment, you are flooded with an emotional signal. It is strong, primitive and highly effective at making you either run, attack, bond, threaten or pause.  Emotions tied to memories help us boil vast decades of experience  down into an immediate instinctive reaction.

Hair trigger emotions exists because more complex cognition takes time and for certain classes of decision, delays yield failure and failure is costly. If you are attacked by wolf, it likely isn’t prudent to debate the finer details of how you classify canids. Much later, be it seconds or hours, your conscious understanding of the situation kicks in and moderates the emotional response.  More often than not, what we think of as consciousness is little more than a post processed justification of our ongoing roller coaster of instinctive emotional reactions.

Emotions are necessary but they are not civilized.  It is easy to imprint rapid fire lessons that trigger at the worst possible moment.  A child who learns to lash out in anger as a way of surviving neighborhood bullies might have difficulty as an adult if he reacts the same way when he perceives a more subtle theme of bullying from his boss.  What makes managing emotions so tricky is that such emotional triggering situations unfold before we are even aware they are occurring.  Emotions are by definition lessons turned into lightning, unconscious action (or inaction as the case may be).

Narrative as a means of playing emotional scenarios

You cannot easily or consciously stop emotions in full activation; however you can train them ahead of time.  One method (of many!) is to test and explore our emotions in the safe mediums of narrative, sound and imagery. The mechanism for triggering a safe emotional response seems to be primarily based off a mixture of empathy and the emotional aspects of memory that we’ve previously covered.

Stimuli: When we see or read a particular evocative narrative or scene.

Memory: We tap into our own related stored memories

Synthesis: We assemble disparate elements into a coherent whole

Empathy: We simulate what we might feel in this particular situation

Conscious understanding: We process the resulting safe emotions from a safe distance.

Now imagine that you read about the dog sitting on the sidewalk.  You can confront your anxiety with crystal clear understanding that he cannot hurt you.  You activate your empathy and simulate how you might feel if the dog were in fact in front of you.  Now you roll the emotion around and savor it, examining it from multiple angles.  You instinctively role-play the scenario.  Perhaps you become comfortable with the idea that you don’t need to immediately run away from all dogs.

By storing this revised impression, you slightly moderate your future emotional reactions.

In a biological sense, this is a surprisingly inexpensive method of practicing how to moderate our emotions.  Instead of placing yourself in potentially mortal danger, you can instead read about what it while sitting in a chair.  The training that occurs is not perfect, but I suspect that it helps.  There is a wide body of experimental research that shows how emotions are differentiated through a process of psychological response and then the application of a cognitive label.  If you can practice labeling a rush of adrenaline as bravery instead of fear, you may be able to successfully alter your emotions in real world situations.

Though by no means proof of this theory, it is suggestive that many popular fictional and artistic works are highly focused on evoking emotion and chains of strong drama.  Situations that are risky, expensive or socially compromising regularly find their way into the evocative arts and enable us to practice those scenarios in a safe fashion.

Shadow Emotions

The relatively safe emotions that result from consuming and simulating evocative stimuli are what I’m calling shadow emotions.

A shadow emotion is by no means a ‘fake’ emotion.  Your heart rate increases, your palms sweat.  The patterns of the past carry echos of real emotions and your body responds accordingly.  All the physiological signs of experiencing an emotion are present.  However, you know intellectually it is a carefully controlled experiment.

Despite hysterical claims to the contrary, humans appear to have a surprisingly robust understanding of simulation vs. reality.  We labels our simulations as such and can usually set them aside at our convenience.

Shadow emotions are by no means completely safe. Anyone that goes through a therapeutic process where they directly recall past trauma can bear witness to the fact that recalling strong emotions is an intense and even frightening experience.  Distance matters when role-playing stored emotions and the more closely you simulate the original event, the stronger the response.

All this leads to many of the common techniques found in making powerful drama or art.  This list is by no comprehensive, but it is a good sample of the practical tools available to a craftsman interested evoking shadow emotions:

Richly describe salient stimuli

Exaggerate stimuli (Peak Shift Principle)

Layer multiple channels of stimuli

Target commonly shared emotional triggers (Love, Death, Triumph, etc)

Create coherent chains of context and causation to facilitate easy simulation

Personalize the stimuli to better match the emotional history of an individual.

As an artist, a story teller and a game designer, I’ve used all of these and they are far less mysterious than many would presume. When such techniques are well executed, you’ll increase the intensity of the evoked shadow emotion.  The word ‘evoke’ is key since our concern is more about using a signal to trigger emotions that already exists.  As such I think of these techniques clumped primarily into methods of simplifying processing our evocative signal or methods of increasing strength of that signal.

Shadow emotions absolutely exist in games.  In fact, the game industry spends ludicrous sums of money attempting to ensure that high end console titles are as good at evoking shadow emotions as media such as movies or books.  During the dark reign of the techno-cultists who preached the ascendancy of visual immersion, realism and games as predominantly narrative medium, a thousand chained craftsmen made heroic attempts to evoke stronger shadow emotions.  See such baroque creations as Mortal Combat, God of War or L.A. Noire.  This expensive pursuit will continue because humans crave shadow emotions as a path to more effective emotional cognition.  Game developers, as paid schmucks making disposable and consumable media, have an economic incentive to fill this need.

The next time you safely experience the emotion of shooting a minority-skinned terrorist in the head and watching the beautifully rendered blood and brains splatter in slow motion, step back and consider the emotional role-playing that you are simulating.  It obviously isn’t real, but you do feel something. Perhaps it is even therapeutic.  These are shadow emotions in action.  I remain unimpressed, but perhaps if we render those skull fragments at a higher resolution, AAA games will one day achieve something deeply meaningful.

Primary emotions in games

In this expensive pursuit of shadow emotions, we may have accidentally sidelined deeper exploration of a phenomena more fundamental to the emotional capabilities of games.

I spend large portions of my day observing game players.  Some of this is observation of others, but there is also a peculiar detached observation of my own reactions to a particular game or prototype. Repeatedly, I see sparkles of emotion that seem to have different roots than shadow emotions.  A player might become frustrated that they don’t understand a particular level layout.  Or they may feel anguish when their character suffers permadeath in Realm of the Mad God.  Or they may feel elation at finally getting the long tetrimino necessary to clear four rows in Tetris.

I would make the bold and perhaps unsupportable claim that these responses are not a reference to a past emotional experience.  Instead they seem to be derived from much more primitive circuitry.   Where do emotions originally come from?  Not all are reflections of memories past.  There are means of creating emotions from scratch.

Consider the sense of anguish that one feels when the character you’ve built up over many hours of dedicated play dies for all eternity.  This system, permadeath, is quite uncommon in many modern games, but thousands of players go through the process everyday in the game Realm of the Mad God.  As a designer you can think of this experience in almost purely mechanical terms.  A player invests time and energy into accumulating a resources and capabilities inside a defined value structure.  Then due mostly to a failure of skill, the player gets hit with a barrage of bullets and that investment is irretrievably lost.

Despite the coldly mechanistic nature of the system, the player feels intense anguish.  It is a raw, primordial thing that courses through your veins and makes breathing difficult.  There is really nothing playful or distant about this emotion. The magnitude and newness of the loss directly correlates to the intensity of the experience. Most players I know have great difficulty setting aside the first major loss and pretending that it did not matter. Some will even quit the game because the emotional intensity is just too much to bear.

What I find intriguing about this particular emotion reaction is that it pops up in other non-gaming scenarios.  Recently I forgot to save a file and in one horrible instant lost hours of labor.  The self recrimination and sense of loss is quite similar. In a more extreme example, when the stock market collapsed in the 1920′s the emotional response to abrupt and permanent loss was so great that people took to jumping from buildings. The systemic creation of emotion is a powerful phenomena.

There are variations on the theme that result in a spectrum of different yet equally reproducible emotions.  If the player is struck with lag or a control glitch or they feel that some other player helped cause their demise, the emotional reaction is almost always incandescent rage.  Small adjustments to the mechanical systems of cause and effect result in distinct emotional responses.

Primary emotions appear to be emotions triggered by interactive situations not evocative stimuli.  They tend to involve several telling mechanical factors:

Territory

Time

Resources

Information

Investment and Loss

Skill and Randomness

Social interaction

As I write this list, I can’t help but realize that these sound like many of the fundamental elements of games.  Yes, we can easily talk about games as systems in same breath as emotions.  There is no need to scurry back to the well worn tropes of evocative media.  As game developers, we really do not need the crutch of shadow emotions to create a meaningful emotional experience for our players.  Instead, we can succeed by making “games as games” not “games as some bizarrely crippled copy of another industry.”

I wish I could say more about the exact biological process behind generating primary emotions, but alas it is not my area of expertise.  Instead, the best I can do for the moment is to describe the pragmatic process that I use to create desired primary emotions in a population of players.  Compare the following process to the one I listed above for shadow emotions.  They are rather different.

Define: Create mechanics and models that describe a player-centric system of value.  What should the player care about and how do the systems and resources reinforce their interest?

Acclimate the player to value structures by having them interact with it repeatedly via various loops and processes.  Pay careful attention to skill and resource acquisition as well as the formation of social bonds since these must be grown.

Trigger: Put the player directly in situations involve a practical loss or gain that triggers the generation of new primary emotions.

You can certain use evocative stimuli within such a process, but it will always be a supporting tool.  The emotions are engineered from the players interactions and experience with the system and not by bombarding someone with  images, dialog or sound. Player choice matters.  Failure matters.  Learning and skill matters.  The game matters.

My friend Stephane Bura has done important work in mapping game systems onto emotions, but there is far more to be done. I highly recommend you read through his pioneering essay Emotion Engineering in Games.  It took several years before it started to sink in, but I’m hoping that you’ll have a head start.

Conclusion

I’ve derived immense practical value from the distinction between primary emotions and shadow emotions.  Once you’ve internalized the concept, you can look at a game and ask with great clarity “How is this player emotion being generated?”   Once you know the mechanism, you can then take steps to amplify or soften the observed effect. Should you increase the fidelity of visual feedback or merely change a resource variable? If you know neither the type of emotion nor mechanism driving the emotion, you are designing blindly.

It is also important that we start talking about how games generate primary emotions. The feeling of victory in a game of Chess is real. The feeling of anger at a Counter Strike camper is real and visceral. The feeling of belonging when you are asked to join a popular guild will stay with you for the rest of your life. We are not reflecting or empathizing (though this can occur in parallel). Due to the interactive nature of the game and our ability to adopt the value structure of the game, there are consequences that are real enough for our body to  muster actual new-to-the-world emotions.  This is an amazing and fundamental property of games that is at best weakly represented in more traditional media.  Let’s play to our strengths.

Every second you spend blathering on about the damnable Hero’s Journey or the role of traditional evocative narrative is a second you could instead be exploring the vast and uncharted frontier of emotional game design. We make games.  And games are great and powerful entities in their own right.  What happens if you strip out as much of your reliance on shadow emotions as possible and focus your design efforts on creating primary emotions in your players?

In Realm of the Mad God, the player dies. And he can’t come back. It is a harsh penalty with strong sense of failure. Colliding with a 8×8 pixelated bullet with no fidelity, realism or crafted narrative means something emotionally that no movie or novel will ever capture.(source:lostgarden


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