Week 5

In last week’s supervisory team meeting, it was mentioned that our current direction was too broad. Afterwards we decided that we would focus our research onto one aspect of mise-en-scène, specifically lighting and or colour in games to elicit emotion. Nick then went about creating the layout for the literature survey, and as a team, we created several possible headings on what was going to be written about.

After checking through the journals, and deciding as a team which would be the most useful towards our project, we started to write out the literature survey. It was decided that we each do certain sections on the literature survey. I fleshed out the psychology of emotion section and part of the abstract, and then passed it between the team members. We then went on to refining it, in addition to Matt, Nick and James’s sections, into one document that flowed from one part to the next. Once the literature survey was completed we then proof read it several times individually and made any corrections to the document as a group.

After that we discussed what was to go in the Academic Pitch, which Nick wrote then we discussed it and made some additions to the pitch. James and Matt created the design document, which we all reviewed and which Nick re-wrote, to make sure all the documents had the same consistency to them, instead of looking disjointed, had we all kept our different styles of writing in. From this we discussed a list of milestones between the team, and decided on a plan which was completed as a group.

On the 25th, we discussed the work so far with Claire, who pointed out that we were missing what testing methods in the literature survey. Afterwards we discussed the suggestions and made changes to the documents. On Thursday, we met up with the supervisory team where we discussed several points deliverables, which we adjusted later in the afternoon.

Week starting 15th October

11. Lazzaro, N., XEODesign, Oakland (2005) Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story, Available at:
http://xeodesign.com/xeodesign_whyweplaygames.pdf
Accessed: 11/10/07

Pioneers in Player Experience Research and Design methods XEODesign conducted an independent cross-genre research study on why people play games and identified over thirty emotions coming from gameplay rather than story. Our results revealed that people play games not so much for the game itself as for the experience the game creates: an adrenaline rush, a vicarious adventure, a mental challenge; or the structure games provide, such as a moment of solitude or the company of friends.

XEODesign created 12 models of Player Experience from the data collected. In looking at how games create emotion without story we created 4 Keys to emotion without story that met these requirements:
Criteria for 4 Keys
1. What Players Like Most about Playing
2. Creates Unique Emotion without Story
3. Already Present in Ultra Popular Games
4. Supported by Psychology Theory and Other Larger Studies

XEODesign’s research shows that each Key is a reason people play and is a mechanism for emotion in a different aspect of the Player Experience. Both players and games vary in how important each Key is to having fun.

This is another must-read journal mentioned by Matt/Nick. It covers a lot of interesting points concerning how some emotions can be generated without actually having a story in the game. They concluded that there were 4 keys to emotion without story:

1. Hard Fun: Players like the opportunities for challenge, strategy, and problem solving. Their comments focus on the game’s challenge and strategic thinking and problem solving. This “Hard Fun” frequently generates emotions and experiences of Frustration, and Fiero.
2. Easy Fun: Players enjoy intrigue and curiosity. Players become immersed in games when it absorbs their complete attention, or when it takes them on an exciting adventure. These Immersive game aspects are “Easy Fun” and generate emotions and experiences of Wonder, Awe, and Mystery.
3. Altered States: Players treasure the enjoyment from their internal experiences in reaction to the visceral, behaviour, cognitive, and social properties. These players play for internal sensations such as Excitement or Relief from their thoughts and feelings.
4. The People Factor: Players use games as mechanisms for social experiences. These players enjoy the emotions of Amusement, Schadenfreude, and Naches coming from the social experiences of competition, teamwork, as well as opportunity for social bonding and personal recognition that comes from playing with others.

They also created a list of emotions (p6), with common themes and triggers, even going so far as to use terms from other languages since there was no adequate description in the English vocabulary. For example, Fiero (Italian), means personal triumph over adversity. The ultimate Game Emotion

12. Ermi. L., Mäyrä, F., Hypermedia Laboratory, University of Tampere, Finland, (2005) Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience: Analysing Immersion
Available at:
http://www.uta.fi/~tlilma/gameplay_experience.pdf
Accessed: 13/10/07

Challenge consists of two main dimensions, the challenge of speed or ‘pace’ and ‘cognitive challenges’. The quality of gameplay is good when these challenges are in balance with each other.

Playing games does not always feel fun: on the contrary, it quite often appears to be stressful and frustrating. Experiences that are usually classed as unpleasant can be experienced as pleasurable in certain contexts. So, what makes e.g. failing fun? Klimmt has applied Zillmann’s excitation transfer theory and proposed that the suspense, anxiety and physical arousal elicited by playing are interpreted as positive feelings because players anticipate a resolution and a closure such as winning the game or completing the task.

Klimmt has constructed a three-level model of the enjoyment of playing digital games, the first level of which consists of the interactive input-output loops, the second of cyclic feelings of suspense and relief, and the third is related to the fascination of a temporary escape into another world.

This journal talks a lot about immersion in games, and what factors contributed to this. Many children who played games were interviewed, and from this they were able to create a diagram (Figure 1, p6) that shows the elements related to pleasurable gameplay experiences that emerged from those interviews, with audiovisual quality and style being one of the central aspects of good digital games. In addition to this, they also found children analysed the varying levels of challenge in games quite carefully, depending if the succeeded, advancing and the uncertainty of the final outcome was an important factor to the overall suspense of playing. Thirdly the children considered imaginary world and fantasy to be another central aspect in many games.

Figure 2 (p 8) has an interesting diagram on how the three key dimensions of immersions are related to several other fundamental components.

The authors went on to test their Gameplay Experience model by using a questionnaire that addressed the three aspects of gameplay immersion and responses give on a 5-point Likert scale, using players from multiple different games (p9). From the list of games on that page, Half-Life 2 produced the most immersion in terms of sensory experiences, with Nethack on the lowest. When analysing results from challenge-based immersion, Nethack was the game that achieved a top score. Figure 3 on page 11 shows a full breakdown of the games and their average amount of immersion for each type reported by players.

13. Portnow, J. (2007) GAME DESIGN: The Bifurcated Mind
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6652&Itemid=50
Accessed: 16/10/07

It’s already clear enough that this approach is relatively common, but let’s look a little closer. Consider all of those games where you thought you were offered two separate motivations only to realize later that there was really just one.

For example: imagine a game where you appear at first to be torn between saving civilians and protecting yourself. Now imagine that the civilians you save are worth points. Next imagine that in our game every 25,000 points gets you an extra life. The choice between saving civilians and saving yourself becomes moot when you put these two facts together and realize that, since saving civilians translate into points and 25,000 points gets you an extra life, you only risk dying if the profit is more than 25,000 points. Ergo there is only really one motivation.

This article discusses a lot of points concerning how the player deals with making choices within a game, usually choosing the path that has the most beneficial rewards to the player. The author also discusses the lack of “personality” on some of the NPC characters and possible options for developers to rectify this, for example making them cower or try to help allies who were gunned down by pulling them out of the fight

14. Desmet, P., (2005) Measuring emotion: development and application of an instrument to measure emotional responses to products, Funology: from usability to enjoyment, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA
Accessed: 17/10/07

Measuring Emotions Development and Application of an Instrument to Measure Emotional Responses to Products, Department of Industrial Design, Delft University of Technology, Before one can measure emotions, one must be able to characterise emotions and distinguish them from other states. Unfortunately, this is a problem that currently belongs to those yet unsolved. As there seems to be no empirical solution to the debate on which component is sufficient or necessary to define emotions, at present the most favoured solutions is to say that emotions are best treated as a multifaceted phenomenon consisting of the following components: behavioural reactions (e.g. approaching), expressive reactions (e.g. smiling), physiological reactions (e.g. heart pounding), and subjective feelings (e.g. feeling amused).

Subjective feeling (e.g. feeling happy or feeling inspired) is the conscious awareness of the emotional state one is in, i.e. the subjective emotional experience. Each emotion involves a specific feeling which is a basic, irreducible kind of mental element (Titchener 1908). These subjective feelings can only be measured through self-report. The most often used self-report instruments require respondents to report their emotions with the use of a set of rating scales or verbal protocols.

An example is the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM; Lang 1985). With SAM, respondents point out the puppets that in their opinion best portray their emotion. Although applicable in between-culture studies, these non-verbal scales also have an important limitation, which is that they do not measure distinct emotions but only generalised emotional states (in terms of underlying dimensions such as pleasantness and arousal). It was therefore decided to develop a new instrument for emotions evoked by products.

Pages 2-6 in this article seem useful to our project, because it shows us one method an actual company has used to test how the test participants felt towards certain models of cars using their Product Emotion Measurement instrument (PrEmo). It also talks about how hard it is to determine characteristics of certain emotions, and that making the participant choose a “general” emotion rather than a specific one, or using something similar to figure 1 in the journal might be useful on our questionnaire. The rest of the journal describes how they implemented their PrEmo for multi-cultural use, rather than relying on vocal-based tests (which are limited by language).



http://www.oridem.eu/userfiles/File/pdf/papermeasuring.pdf

Week starting 8th october

8. Vorderer, P. University of southern California, Hartmann, T. & Klimmt, C. University of Music and Drama, Hannover, Germany (2003) Explaining the enjoyment of playing video games: The role of competition, Available at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=958735
Accessed: 30/09/07


Klimmt and Vorderer have suggested to model the process of
playing a video game as a sequence of situations each of which features
1. Certain possibilities to act,
2. A specific necessity to act,
3. The player’s attempt to resolve the necessity to act by applying (some of) the possibilities to act,

4. A result which influences the enjoyment felt by the player and the configuration of the subsequent situation.

Being faced with a challenge, the player has to act to overcome the challenge, either succeeding or failing. The result affects both the emotional state of the player and the subsequent game situation: A successful completion of the situation will lead to positive affect which is connected to high arousal

In sum, four intertwined factors, two on a general level and two on a computer-game specific level, can be identified to explain an individual’s readiness to select computer
games as competitive situations. Factors on a general level are

(1) The desire to maintain or enhance the own self-esteem and mood as a general motivation and
(2) The competitiveness of the social value disposition as a general disposition. On the computer-game-specific level,
(3) The motivation to challenge and surpass other opponents, as well as
(4) A computer-game-related self-efficacy can be assumed as determinants of the selection and enjoyment of competitive computer games

This document covers a lot of interesting points about why players enjoy playing video games, and what those players come to expect of a video game. They test their theory with the game Tomb Raider with two separate conditions, one had many different possibilities for the player to do, such as different weapons and tools, the other had very little. Overall they found that having fewer options to do what the player wanted meant they would get bored quicker.


9. Logas ,H., Telltale games, Muller, D., Georgia Institute of Technology, (2006) Mise-en-scène Applied to Level Design: Adapting a Holistic Approach to Level Design
Available at
http://www.digra.org:8080/Plone/dl/db/06276.13262.pdf
Accessed: 02/10/07


In film, mise-en-scéne is a holistic approach to constructing a frame. Everything that is visible in a given scene is selected by the film director to communicate information to the viewer, both on a conscious and sub-conscious level.

Mise-en-scène is defined by film theorist Robert Kolker as: “the use of space within the frame: the placement of actors and props, the relationship of the camera to the space in front of it, camera movement, the use of colour or black and white, lighting, the size of the screen frame itself”. [3] It is a French term that literally translates, “put in the scene”.

Lighting places an important part in setting the atmosphere in The Shining. In the beginning, Jack is lit from above with a diffuse light that softens his features. The light is warm and inviting, with amber and peach tones that evoke a sense of peace and tranquillity. As Jack descends into madness, the lighting of his character changes to match his altered state.

Although the texts we have examined in this paper are both firmly rooted in the horror genre, mise-en-scéne in used in all genres of film to imbue scenes with the full range of human emotion, from sorrow to exuberance. In the world of games, however, the techniques of mise-en-scéne seem to have matured most in the survival-horror genre.


This is one of the journals Matt suggested we should all read; it covers mise-en-scene, and compares the movie The Shining to the game Silent Hill 4. It is mentioned that the ambient lighting of the characters and rooms is important to convey the mood across to the player or viewer. As it also mentions that the survival horror genre is the most developed in game at the moment, it would be worth looking at several different games from this genre and look for common trends among them


10. Sweetset, P., Wyeth, P. The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia (2005) GameFlow: a model for evaluating player enjoyment in games, Available at
http://interactive.usc.edu/members/jchen/p3a-sweetser.pdf_sid=GOHl46N4qqA&mbox=INBOX&charset=escaped_unicode&uid=5902&number=4&filename=p3a-sweetser.pdf
Accessed: 09/10/07

Flow experiences consist of eight elements, as follows:

(1) A task that can be completed;
(2) The ability to concentrate on the task;
(3) That concentration is possible because the task has clear goals;
(4) That concentration is possible because the task provides immediate feedback;
(5) The ability to exercise a sense of control over actions;
(6) A deep but effortless involvement that removes awareness of the frustrations of
everyday life;
(7) Concern for self disappears, but sense of self emerges stronger afterwards; and
(8) The sense of the duration of time is altered

The combination of these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment so rewarding that people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

If the player is sufficiently skilled and the tasks have clear goals and feedback, then he or she will feel a sense of control over the task. The resulting feeling for the player is total immersion or absorption in the game, which causes them to lose awareness of everyday life, concern for themselves, and alters their sense of time.

It was identified that some of the GameFlow criteria are more suited to specific game
genres and aren’t applicable to strategy games. The control criterion of feeling a sense of control and impact onto the game world (like the player’s actions matter and are shaping the game world) was identified as being more relevant to role-playing games.

This journal raised a lot of interesting points concerning game flow; the many different factors that are involved (concentration, challenge, skill, etc), and that challenge is said to be the most important aspect of good game design. While the two games compared in the journal are RTS (Real-Time-Strategy) games, the comparison between a game that received a lot of positive reviews (Warcraft 3) is more likely to induce “GameFlow” than one which was given more negative reviews (Lords of EverQuest) could be applied to games from other genres. It also listed a criteria table for “GameFlow” which could be a useful source of information later on.

Week Starting 1st October

3. Tomlinson, W. M. Jr. (1999) Interactivity and Emotion through Cinematography, California Institute of the Arts, Available at
http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~badger/Thesis/Thesis.pdf
Accessed: 29/09/07

“Whenever a moving visual work is created – a movie, cartoon, video game, or virtual environment, the authors need to consider how their work will be seen by the audience”

“The first thing people inherently test for is responsiveness. If they pick up an interface and move it, they expect something to happen.

Once they have verified to their satisfaction that a system is not broken, participants look for some intelligible response to their action.
Once participants have a grasp of the basic means of interaction, they expect there to be “more to it than that.” Complexity is my third level of participant expectation

After participants feel confident in their understanding of the complexity of the interaction, they begin to expect subtlety.”


“With regard to cinematography participant expectations are quite stringent. If the camera holds on an image that is not a character for more than a few seconds, or stops suddenly in the middle of a smooth pan, or goes inside of a tree, it is broken.

If the camera moves around so much that it is impossible for participants to get their bearings, it is confusing. And if it shows the same shots over and over and over again, it is boring”

This is another interesting piece; it talks a lot about how the designers need to consider the scenes in the game, and how the player will react to those scenes. It also mentions how camera angels and lighting can be used to convey emotions, psychological relationships, and many other important pieces of information about the scene. I put several quotes I thought would be useful to remember above, as it shows what the game designer needs to keep in mind, and some of the aspects people tend to look for, or expect, when they first pick up a game.

This journal also references Picard, R. (1998). Affective Computing, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Who lists six primary emotions, happiness, anger, sadness, fear, surprise and disgust, that were also mentioned in “A cognitive Psychological Approach to Gameplay Emotions, although it listed one other emotion, worry.

They also talk in depth about “The CameraCreature” that was designed to be a virtual cinematographer; an invisible NPC that could make decisions on its own based on feedback from other NPCs, and then decide which event was more important to show the player. While there were still a few bugs in the system, such as not always showing the most desirable scene, it did look like a useful tool to use.

They compare this to some of the camera features used in other games, such as in Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Nintendo, 1998), Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996), Tomb Raider (Core Design, Eidos Interactive, 1996), Ultima Online (Origin Systems, Electronic Arts, 1997), Grim Fandango (LucasArts, 1998), Doom (Id Software, 1993) and Thief (Looking glass studios, Eidos Interactive, 1998). It mentions that the third person games, Zelda, Mario 64 and Tomb raider, while having good camera systems, did not really give the characters much emotion, with Thief being the best game out of the selection that generated emotion, albeit only a few, the sensation of suspense and fear of being caught by the NPCs.




4. Laaksolahti, J., Persson, P. & Palo, C. Swedish Institute of Computer Science, (2000) Kaktus: A Socio-Emotionally Rich Interactive Narrative, Available at
http://www.sics.se/humle/projects/Kaktus/papers/sid2001.pdf
Accessed: 29/09/07

This short journal briefly explains what Kaktus is;

“The game scenario centers around three teen-age girls who are organizing a party for their high-school friends. The plot develops over the week before the party. The player acts as one of the characters while the system controls the others. In order to arrange a successful party, the player must make socially complex decisions, e.g., inviting the ‘right’ people, getting rid of parents, encouraging or discouraging alcohol consumption.”

It explains how the game works, and requires users to think about emotional state of the NPCs to progress in the game. It mentions that Kaktus can be useful for “young players explore the weave of friendship, love and socio-emotional relations at a time in life when such issues are especially complex.”




5. Ravaja, N., Saari, T., Laarni, J., Kallinen, K., & Salminen, M. Helsinki School of Economics,
Holopainen, J. Nokia Research Center,
Järvinen, A. The Finnish National Lottery, (2004) Emotional Response Patterns and Sense of Presence during Video Games: Potential Criterion Variables for Game Design, Available at
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1028068&CFID=36706512&CFTOKEN=19354880
Accessed: 29/09/07

This study examined whether there were reliable differences in the emotional response patterns and sense of presence elicited by games with different characteristics, and that most theorists endorse the view that;

“Emotions are constituted by three aspects or components: subjective feeling, expressive behaviour, and physiological arousal; others add motivational state or action tendency and/or cognitive processing.”

Scherer, K.R. Neuroscience projections to current debates in emotion psychology. Cognition and Emotion, 7, (1993), 1-41.

It mentions that studies have shown different games elicit considerable cardiovascular reactivity, and that in:

Johnston, D.W., Anastasiades, P., and Wood, C. The relationship between cardiovascular responses in the laboratory and in the field. Psychophysiology, 27, (1990), 34-44.

It shows that a two-person football video game caused higher HR reactivity compared to a “squash practice” video game against a machine.

Pages 5 – 7 of this journal show some charts, showing how the participants “felt” during gameplay, and that a single game can generate many different games. It also mention that if someone wanted to asses how “good” or “bad” a certain game is on the bases of the emotional responses, they would have to look at the emotional patterns or profiles associated with those different games, and that a game could not be bad if it just generated negative emotions, for example survival horror games.




6. Ravaja, N., Saari, T., Laarni, J., Kallinen, K., & Salminen, M. Helsinki School of Economics,
Holopainen, J. Nokia Research Center,
Järvinen, A. The Finnish National Lottery (2005) The Psychophysiology of Video gaming: Phasic Emotional Responses to Game events, Available at
http://www.digra.org:8080/Plone/dl/db/06278.36196.pdf
Accessed: 29/09/07

“Studies on psycho-physiological reactivity to stress have shown that different video games (i.e., an active coping task) prompt notable increases in HR and blood pressure”

“In video games, there is a dynamic flow of events and action, with games potentially eliciting a large number of different emotions varying across time”

This journal was an experiment using “phasic” responses, opposed to the usual “Tonic” (e.g. the mean physiological value during the game minus pre-game baseline) Reponses, this experiment uses facial electromyography, skin conductance and the cardiac interbeat interval to try and generate more accurate results.
Overall, they generate some accurate results, if somewhat unexpected from certain situations, e.g. some “negative events” (such as the player missing the pins) didn’t produce negative emotions. It also uses one of the games from “Emotional Response Patters and Sense of Presence during Video Games”, by the same authors and possibly using the same participants.

7. He, L.& Cohen, M., Microsoft Research,
Salesin, D., University of Washington, (1996). The Virtual Cinematographer: A Paradigm for Automatic Real-Time Camera control and Directing, Available at
http://grail.cs.washington.edu/pub/papers/virtcine.pdf
Accessed: 30/09/07

This is similar to the journal to Interactivity and Emotion through Cinematography, in that it uses a Virtual Cinematographer, while the other journal used a “CreatureCamera”. It also has a list of some useful points when making filming a scene;



1. Don’t cross the line: Once an initial shot is taken from the left or right side of the line of interest, subsequent shots should remain on that side. This rule ensures that successive shots of a moving actor maintain the direction of apparent motion.

2. Avoid jump cuts: Across the cut there should be a marked difference in the size, view, or number of actors between the two setups. A cut failing to meet these conditions creates a jerky, sloppy effect.

3. Use establishing shots: Establish a scene before moving to close shots. If there is a new development in the scene, the situation must be re-established.

4. Let the actor lead: The actor should initiate all movement, with the camera following; conversely, the camera should come to rest a little before the actor.

5. Break movement: A scene illustrating motion should be broken into at least two shots. Typically, each shot is cut so that the actor appears to move across half the screen area.

“The rules of cinematography dictate that when the line of interest remains constant, the camera should remain on the same side of the line.

When the line of interest changes, for example, when one of the two actors in the shot changes position, the choice is not as well defined.

We have found that a good rule is to choose the instance in which the camera orientation with respect to the new line of interest is closest to the orientation of the previous shot.”

An interesting follow-up from this might be:Joseph V. Mascelli. The Five C’s of Cinematography. Cine/Grafic Publications, Hollywood, 1965.