Building an emotional sequence in games

What the talk is about

Michael Voitovich argues that a game designer should deliberately build emotions into every element of a game instead of blindly copying other people's successful mechanics. He explains how emotions work: they arise from a bodily state and steer the mind, not the other way around. He pictures emotions as a space with three axes (pleasure, arousal and tension), where the player is always moving and tension cannot last forever. He then shows how interface, fonts, colour, music, narrative and suspense affect feelings, with examples from his card game Star Crusade, and touches on how emotional design interacts with monetization. He closes by claiming that in games the emotional "small things" matter more than balance. Useful for game designers, UI artists, sound designers and producers.