A Cognitive Psychological Approach to Gameplay Emotions

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Perron Bernard
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

Although emotions elicited by the fictional world or the artefact play a part in story-driven video games, they are certainly not the focus of the experience. From a cognitive psychological perspective, this paper studies the appraisal and action dimensions of emotions arising from gameplay. As it relies on cognitive film theories about popular narrative movies, it also revisits their conceptual sources in order to better reflect on the specificity of those gameplay emotions.

 

In the Horrifying Magic Cycle of Resident Evil 5: A Case Study [Abstract]

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Perron Bernard
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

In two previous essays (Perron, 2006 and Arsenault & Perron 2008), I have conceptualized the partaking in a game as a cognitive frame, as an ongoing process. To explain the gamer’s immersion and progression through a game, I have resorted to the figure of the cycle, of the spiral instead of talking about Huizinga’s “magic circle”. In this model, three interconnected spirals are represented: the heuristic spiral of gameplay (the most important), the heuristic spiral of narrative and the hermeneutic spiral. These are the cycles the gamer has to go through to answer gameplay, narrative, and interpretative questions. More the gamer learns to play the game, more he learns about the story and meanings, more he gains skills and knowledge.