Categorizing Experience-based Design: Emotion-driven Design

In my introduction to this series, I described two umbrella categories for experience-based design: emotion-based designs and cognitive-based designs. Each of the main categories is described as "-driven design," highlighting that while games could fall into multiple categories, designers should be concerned with what is "driving" the ideal experience of their game. Under the emotion-based umbrella are emotion-driven design, thematic transportation-driven design, and empathy-driven design. Under the cognitive-based umbrella are intellect challenging design and education design. Today's post will detail what emotion-driven design is and how it differs from other emotion-based designs. 

Emotion-driven design (EDD) is focused on making "what players feel while playing” the most important part of the design. Other emotion-based designs are rooted in emotion, but emotion-driven design is about creating feelings for their own sake. EDDs are not always strongly connected to theme. Designs that focus on a singular desired emotion, I label as ‘simple-emotion’ driven designs (SEDDs). Designs that focus on two or more desired emotions are ‘complex-emotion’ driven designs (CEDDs). A hallmark of emotion-driven games is that the players feel the emotion as themselves and not as ‘bleed’ from their avatars. (More on that later.) These emotions largely arise from the mechanics and style of gameplay: real time games feel frenetic; push your luck games feel tense; etc. 

Simple emotion-driven games tend to pull a limited emotional spectrum from the mechanics (and dynamics) of the gameplay itself, as opposed to a narrative. Sometimes, individual emotions are focused on, such as the tense thrill of a good push-your-luck game. Quacks of Quedlinburg is an excellent example of a game driven by a singular emotional experience. Some critics argue that Quacks lacks a certain amount of strategy and tactics to be a good game, but I would argue that making Quacks a thinker game would destroy what makes it good: the emotional experience. And since Quacks is not Wolfgang Warsch's only foray into experience-based design (famously, The Mind), I think it is safe to say that the experience of playing Quacks is an intentional design choice. Racing games, gambling games, and some auction games all have similar emotional experiences. What makes those games fall clearly into the SEDD category is if the emotional experience appears to be the goal of the design. So, some auction games may capture the feeling of bidding at a live auction, whereas others emphasize the intellectual experience of calculating risk and reward.

Other examples of simple emotion-driven designs can include “cozy” games, dexterity games, mass market “take that” games, and social deduction games. There may still be an emotional arc to a SEDD, but the goal of the design is to produce a very specific emotional experience. Any emotion-based design has to go beyond the excitement of starting to play, the thrill of an early lead, the agony of defeat, etc. All games have an emotional experience of that sort. SEDDs drill down to consistently pull a particular strong emotion from players. The very singular nature of the focus forces the theme to the periphery the same way an abstract game with a pasted-on theme does. Distillation, even of emotions, will always abstract a theme. 

Complex emotion-driven designs seek to pull more than one specific emotion from players. An easy way to accomplish this is to have players swap roles at various points in the game, thus changing goals, such as in Sheriff of Nottingham. Players experience two very different emotions playing as the sheriff trying to catch smugglers and merchants attempting to bluff their way to market. However, simply switching roles does not make a game a CEDD. Citadels has a fairly uniform emotional journey regardless of which roles you chose throughout the game. Other examples of CEDDs include party games with judging mechanics, games with 2 distinct phases of gameplay, or scenario-based games. Conversely, one vs. all games typically have two very different emotional experiences for the players, but roles are not changed during a single game, so each player has a singular emotional experience. Because these asymmetric designs still require more emotional crafting by the designer than SEDDs, they fall under the label of complex emotion-driven designs. CEDDs have a more varied emotional experience, but still primarily access emotions through mechanics, although we do start to see immersive elements come through, as many CEDDs are more thematic, due to the fact that the experiences are more complex and thus easier to connect to theme. As a reminder, players generally do not identify with their role significantly in EDDs; they play as themselves taking game actions, not as characters taking story actions. Sometimes, whether a game is played as an CEDD or as a more narratively driven experience depends on the group of players. Games of this nature are usually touted as having “opportunity for role-play or story-telling,” but those elements are not required by the game. Thus many social deduction games, like Werewolf, can fall into either this category or the next one, thematic transportation-driven design.

In conclusion, emotion-driven designs accomplish their goal primarily through mechanisms. Mechanisms have an inherent emotional content apart from theme. Push Your Luck games feel very different from auction games. Theme in EDDs is mostly used as atmosphere that ideally reinforces the tone of the mechanisms. Games can explore one emotional experience or more than one, but to be an EDD a game must feel as if the main purpose of the game is to feel a certain way while playing it. 

The next post will cover thematic transportation-driven design, otherwise known as immersive games.