I wasn’t planning on posting anything today, but I just finished reading through a fascinating article on Gamasutra on “Emotion Engineering”:

• Emotion Engineering: A Scientific Approach For Understanding Game Appeal

The article is a fairly long and somewhat “academic” read, but I really enjoyed it. The author (Stéphane Bura) is trying to create a set of rules for generating an emotional response in players through a game.

I’ve been talking for some time with my peers about the need for more rigorously defined language for speaking about video games. In order for us to be able to think critically about games we need a common language with which to speak. Bura is attempting to provide one such language for looking at emotion in games. Even if it’s not perfect, I think it’s a great starting point.

Owen

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 8:51 am and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.