Affective responses in Digital Games

1. Affective responses in Digital Games In Digital Gaming

2. Emerging Studies (2004) • Visual Bias has dominated games studies: a structural/semiotic angle • Structure/rhetorical/narrative/taxonomical • Semiotic and rhetorical understanding of enjoyment • Psychoanalytical frameworks to understand relationships between players/characters/gamespace • Interactivity: A Rhetorical Performance Loop

3. Games are powerful

4. Experience or Affect is key • The rushyou get from playing is not confined to the screen; • It is sub-rational, • a body thing • It has affective dimensions, which are not programmed but vital to the game.

5. Affect? • Affect is not about emotions • It is a way to describe the “feel” or intensity of an experience • Semiotic approach can address content but NOT the user’s experience • Theories of affect alter how we understand the meaning and experience of virtuality and virtual space and politics of games.

6. Virtual space • Is part of the real world • Interactivity is not a simple transaction between eye and mind • Interactivity is a transaction between eye/mind/body  It is a reflexive/strategic relationships • Virtual is a REALM of potentialities based on peoples’ experiences, not just content distribution systems.

7. Example

8. PostModernCybertheories • Release of the subject from the body • The “floating eye ball” • Assumptions: • Cartesianesque subject: The subject is distinct from then world, a disembodied mind • Sight is the dominant sense, experience is visual • Narrative: from the movement of the eye in a cinematic space • Pictorial perception of Time and space that only exist only in content • Virtual = withdrawing from the world/isolation

9. Floating eye?

10. Perception? • Also has an intensity: • strength of duration of an effect • Embodied reactions: skin response, heartbeat etc… • We don’t just see images, we experience them in ways structural/rhetorical/narrative analysis cannot adequately explain.

11. Human Perception • Image Perception is synaesthetic: involves the participation of other senses and rooted in hearing, movement, touch. • Embodiement and hapticityis essential to understanding the game image. • The effect of presence is felt not seen. • Touch + movement + vision = Spacial coherence

12. The body senses • Tactile/Affective Perception: Links subjectivity + active presence in the world. NOT withdrawn from it • The body is a multisensory system that is fully engaged in digital games and worlds.

13. Power • Cartesian= a specific system of power • Media transmission = real world events become cinema • Many games = cinema • Affective system: games are dynamic system in flux, change is central to them • Games which address political/social issues might do so by encouraging change and modification instead of role playing. • Designing social content in games that incorporates players in action • There are new realities to be met with in our interactions with games; Thru looking at games as affective and embodied praxes. • Opening up new relations between mind/body/technology

14. For example