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Looking for the heart of interactive media: reflections on video games' emotional expression

Published: 15 September 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Ever since they first originated, video games have been perceived as an inferior form of media expression. One major concern has been that they do not seem able to elicit a wide spectrum of emotions, thus being perceived as emotionally shallow. Sustained by a theoretical overview of the nature of play activities and studies on emotion elicitation by video games, this paper hypothesizes on a relationship between certain elements of traditional games and subsequent elicited emotions. From these ensue concerns regarding the narrow spectre of emotions elicited by certain prototypical game structures employed by the game design process.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
Fun and Games '10: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Fun and Games
September 2010
170 pages
ISBN:9781605589077
DOI:10.1145/1823818
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 15 September 2010

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  1. emotion
  2. game design

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Fun and Games '10
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Fun and Games '10: Fun and Games 2010
September 15 - 17, 2010
Leuven, Belgium

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Cited By

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  • (2021)"My Soul Got a Little Bit Cleaner"Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34746645:CHI PLAY(1-19)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2021
  • (2019)First-Person Refugee Games: Ludonarrative Strategies for Playing the Stories of Refugees and Asylum SeekersVideogame Sciences and Arts10.1007/978-3-030-37983-4_1(3-17)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2019
  • (2017)Designing Authentic Emotions for Non-Human CharactersProceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems10.1145/3064663.3064755(477-487)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2017
  • (2017)Affective level design for a role-playing videogame evaluated by a brain---computer interface and machine learning methodsThe Visual Computer: International Journal of Computer Graphics10.1007/s00371-016-1320-233:4(413-427)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2017
  • (2013)Impact of graphical fidelity on physiological responses in virtual environmentsProceedings of the 19th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology10.1145/2503713.2503751(73-76)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2013

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