Designing Story-Centric Games for Player Emotion: A Theoretical Perspective

Narratives are powerful because of their impact on our emotional experiences. Recent years have witnessed significant advances in affective computing and intelligent interaction, presenting a broad range of opportunities for enhancing the design, implementation, and adaptivity of interactive narratives. This paper presents preliminary work examining story-centric games and interactive narratives from the perspective of psychological theories of emotion, with a particular focus on player affect. We examine the sources and duration of player emotion, social facets of emotion, players’ individual differences in emotion, and meta-emotions. Recommendations and future directions for research on player emotion in interactive narratives are discussed.