To start with, as players we all have play experiences. We engage with a gaming encounter, where goals and emotions circulate between the self and other. If one wants to study the general principles of this kind of human activity, one has to focus on what constitutes a ‘player experience’. I will use this term to cover the psychological, cognitive, and emotional aspects of gaming encounters.
In this part of the thesis, consisting of six chapters, I will review various theories on emotions and cognition and synthesize a theory for the purposes of applied ludology. It aims to shed light on the complex nature of player experiences and explain their theoretical basis in psychology. This means exploring many facets of the issue: What is it that motivates players to engage themselves into a game with rules, and what kind of pleasures do they seek from playing games? What can game studies and design learn from the psychology of goals and plans? Do games, by and large, privilege some cognitive abilities over others? How do players – hypothetically, at least – react to various kinds of game events and elements? Is it possible to deduct that certain kinds of emotions are elicited via particular configurations of game systems, particular game mechanics, or particular interaction between self and others? Finally, what kinds of emotion categories are there, and how do they relate to categories of games?
As someone not schooled in psychology, embarking on the task of writing this part of the thesis was, at least personally, a step over another frontier.
Getting familiar with the enormous body of work written about human motivation, emotions, cognition, goals, and the like, soon began to appear as an overwhelming task. What to include, what to leave out, and on what basis? It soon became obvious to me that a thesis of its own could be written about psychological aspects of games. It also became apparent to me that I am most probably leapfrogging across schools of thought and inter-disciplinary debates, as I was not able to find cross-references in the psychological literature where I was expecting to find them.
Nevertheless, I have proceeded to synthesize a toolbox of theory for the analysis and design of player experiences. I have tried to solve the above-mentioned dilemmas by certain choices in focus. Their particular nature is meant to reflect the approach and focus of Games without Frontiers as a whole.
Thereby I will focus on three specific psychological phenomena: goals, emotions, and the reciprocity of self and other.
1. Goals
In my theory of game elements and systems, goals are highly important. They are a specific but privileged instance of the rule set element. Other game elements (see chapter 4) are designed in order to afford the pursuit of goals, i.e.
to facilitate the fundamental objective given to players when they play a particular game. Studying the psychology of goals presents a holistic approach, as goals are found in all kinds of games across media and technology. A different choice, such as choosing to study psychological appeal of game characters, would have presented a case on another level of inquiry, as characters are seen as one particular instance of a specific game element class (components) in the theory at hand. Yet, goals are often embodied into a character, which testifies for their omnipresent nature in the design and play of games.
Usually when theorists discuss player actions and rewards in games, they discuss ‘reward schedules’ based on the behavioural concept of reinforcement.
Positive reinforcement equals a positive reward or sense of progress, negative reinforcement equals removal of something unpleasant. (See, e.g., Loftus &
Loftus 1983, 13–26 and Salen & Zimmerman 2004, 344–5 on these issues.) I have chosen another set of concepts, because there is not really much to say anymore from the perspective of reinforcement theory other than yes, it happens in games, and yes, there are indeed many examples. I believe that an informed, nuanced understanding of goal forms and hierarchies, goal attainment, goal substitution and goal monitoring all provide us with a holistic perspective to players and their experiences. I would argue that this premise presents a welcome, largely unexplored path compared to the somewhat mechanistic view of player behaviour that reinforcement theory suggests.
We find many approaches to be adapted for applied ludology in contemporary psychology. One of them is theories of emotion, where the functions of games are discussed in relation to roles in social interaction.
Emotion theorist Keith Oatley writes:
Games are also ancient. They are models of recurring types of interaction in society, perhaps those that fascinate us or demand the development of abilities of motor skill or problem solving that are too difficult or risky for real life. [...]
[G]ames seem as if they may be defined as activities that offer players top-level goals. Players adopt these goals and then see what it is like to interact with others on the basis of a given system of rules and operations. (Oatley 1992, 202-3.)
In general, I find it puzzling how few (if any) discussions of goals among game studies and game design literature have taken advantage of the enormous amount of study that the subject has drawn within psychology and social psychology.
Most discussion of goals in game design literature take the concept for granted and rely on tacit knowledge and implicit notions of what goals are, and how individuals pursue them, rather than relying on explicated knowledge and
research on the subject in the context of human psyche. Therefore I see that there is void, and I will try to fill it.
2. Emotions
I will start from the following assumption: The road to attaining goals is beset by emotions. As playing games equals taking actions and choices in order to attain goals stated in the rule set, games give birth to experiences of particular emotional nature. Without understanding broadly the different emotional potentials and conditions for emotions at work in games, we lack fundamental dimension of holistic understanding of games as aesthetic products and events.
We have established in the previous chapters that a group of games differ from one another due to the fact that their 1) systems are combined from different elements, 2) the interaction between elements is arranged in different ways, and finally that 3) the elements can be configured or implemented with different styles and/or materials to fulfil their crucial function of embodying rules. Thus the emotions that different game systems produce are bound to differ to certain extent, both categorically and individually. Still, due to the goal-related nature of games, there will also be some ‘universal’ emotion types that will be found, if not across the universe of games, at least across genres. These include such emotions as hope, fear, loss, and pride – all having to do with uncertainty and its resolution, i.e. phenomena games live out of. Still, there is plenty of reason to study the emotional potentials of games in order to find subtler distinctions of game-related emotions and their constituent factors.
In addition to the above two areas of focus, there is another, a more abstract theme that runs through this chapter. It is necessitated by the fact that games are often fundamentally social in nature.
3. Self and other
Reciprocity of self and other – regardless whether the other is another human being or a game system as an agent – is a phenomenon that resurfaces at many points. Anyone who engages in the analysis of games will soon make the observation that there is a constant relationship and tension between the player and her own goals versus the other player’s goals (which might be identical); the player and her possessions versus the possessions of other players; the opportunities, chances, and space to act of one player versus the others, and the strategies of one player versus the strategies of other players. The tension is elicited by the artificial conflict that the game imposes by its rules, especially those that specify goals.
These relationships will be concepualised with respective notions of self and the other, especially in the context of emotions. Emotion theorist Keith Oatley refers to this aspect when he discusses his and Johnson-Laird’s communicative theory of emotions. It necessitates a degree of separation of self and its actions
from others for the sake of analysis and understanding, yet privileging the individual is not meant to imply that the self is unique and separated from society and the relationships it allows and imposes (Oatley 1992, 113–4).
Adopting similar premise is necessary, I believe, in studying games and player behaviour. This problematic is concretely evident when we discuss emotional attribution of one’s own and other players’ actions, or the actions the game system performs as an agent, and how people appraise these actions according to emotional processes.
It has been argued that the main question of cognitive science is essentially a design challenge: how to design a mind. This includes charting out and anticipating the potential problems the mind would have to face, what kind of considerations it would have to do, etc. (Oatley & Jenkins 1996, 252.) This dilemma is upon us when we consider player experiences, and because of it, we are, in fact, analysing and designing players rather than games. With the help of the theory of game elements this task can be incorporated into a holistic analysis and design framework, which is what Games without Frontiers attempts to achieve as a whole.
CHAPTER 5: Key Concepts in Psychology in Terms of Ludology
These games sure provoke some heavy duty feelings.
–David Sudnow, Pilgrim in the Microworld As the quote from David Sudnow’s intricate phenomenological account of playing video game Breakout (Midway Games, 1978) reminds us, games tend to evoke emotions. From personal evidence, most of us are familiar with the fact that game-related emotions can be both positive and negative in tone: pride and joy when we’re succeeding, reproach and distress when we’re losing. There seems to be something in games that compels the human psyche in general, and all too often this experiential side of these aesthetic phenomena is left unexplored in detail. Therefore the next chapters of my thesis will concentrate on the psychological nature of games. The discussion that follows will constitute what I call a ‘theory of player experience’.
This chapter takes a look at a number of basic psychological concepts in the context of games. We begin with a general discussion of why people play games.
It will serve the formation of a theory concerned with how players’ individual tastes get formed within an ecosystem of entertainment consumption choices. I will continue onto definitions of key concepts in psychology (emotion, arousal, mood etc.). Each concept will be examined from the perspective of games and game play, so that the psychology of emotions discussed will have already and always a ludological flavour. The following chapters will continue with a discussion of goals and plans, cognition and pretense, entertainment, and emotions specifically in relation to games and their players.
I see that the theory introduced here has implications for analysis and design, and they can be articulated into the following questions: Is it possible to systematically study emotional reactions in relation to games, and moreover, adapt the concepts and findings into designing such game systems that deliberately give birth to certain types of emotional reactions? How has this been done until now? Is it the task of the game designer to condition players into certain emotional and cognitive behaviour? In terms of theory, the questions go:
How can game designers modulate emotions during game play through the design of the game system, and its elements? What could be the method for a game scholar to study the emotional potential and disposition of a game? Are there methods to analyse conditions that elicit emotions from existing games, i.e.
to analyse the so-called eliciting conditions and action tendencies that emerge for players through engaging with game systems and their elements?
I will expand the notion of game states (see chapter 3) to emotional player states, player motivations, and moods, and provide a method for this kind of analysis. This will require adapting concepts such as appraisal, arousal, pretense, mood management and matching for the purpose of understanding the psychological dimensions of games. Theories that we will discuss also include Reversal theory and Schema theory, and other theories concerning scripts, goals, emotions, motivation, and cognition. In summary, the chapter introduces an approach to understanding players’ emotional engagement with games and a set of useful concepts for analysing it.