Emotion Boot Camp: Putting More Emotion into Play

Overview: Using what players like most about play, this playshop offers tools and tactics for creating emotion for next-generation player experiences based on XEODesign’s close examination of players during play, and Isbister’s research at Stanford and the Rensselaer Games Research Laboratory.

Nicole Lazzaro
Katherine Isbister

Takeaway: a delightful brainstorming session, some valuable metrics of player experience and emotion, and an amazing view into to the lexicon of controlling emotional projection presented by Leonard Pitt (who comes from a theater background.)

I’m going to be a bit chronologically irresponsible here so bear with me. Starting at the end of the 8-hour day and working backwards, the following is the game concept my group brainstormed for the final design challenge. The constraints were as follows:

“Apply what you have learned today about creating emotion [in games]. Break into groups of five and…add emotion to an existing game or create a totally new PX [player experience profile] using biosensors. Choose one of three challenges, then select a game and someone to take notes and present your results. Brainstorm with your group on what you would change to create new emotions. Clear goals and big emotional shifts earn more points in the final vote. Advanced Play: Try replacing the most important feature with something that creates the opposite set of emotions. How big a shift can you get? You have 60 minutes. GO!”

At this point there was a list of games from which to choose, and Nicole added that if the group wanted it could create an entirely new game concept, based on a hypothetical biofeedback input device.

As it turns out, one of the members of our group, Tim Hong, actually works at a company that is relatively far along in creating such a device. I was a little fried at that point – sorry if I’m bungling this, Tim - but the way I remember him describing the device is this: “like a pair of sunglasses, wireless. It senses blinking and eye contractions. We’re running at 60hz so we can effectively capture brief facial displays of emotion like surprise, curiosity, or amusement.” Neat!

As you might expect, my group was the only one that chose to develop a completely unique concept. For whatever reason, as Nicole was describing the optional ‘create a concept based on this hypothetical biosensor peripheral’ challenge, the phrase emotional cannibalism popped into my head. I’m not sure what that says about by mind, but there it is. Move along, move along…

That idea developed quickly into an abstract landscape with various creatures wandering across it, each of which was displaying a different type of exaggerated emotion. To interact with each creature, the player moves in front of it and reads whatever emotional cues it’s putting out, attempting to emulate it themselves. In this way you could steal or cannibalize the “emotional energy” of each creature and add its emotion to your inventory for later use. This led to the idea of using biofeedback to navigate an “emotional landscape” – change the mood you’re projecting and you move in the direction of that part of the emotional landscape. Each separate emotion would be represented in the landscape by a different color of fog or mist, with a gradual fade or crossover between.

From here we discussed the possibility of the idea of a landscape being taken more literally, of a sort of terraforming interface controlled by emotion. The backdrop here would be a more corporeal one; hills, trees, valleys and so on. Projecting more hostile or angry emotions would cause volcanoes and storms to rip the landscape apart and violently reform it, and more calm, amused, or curious emotional projection would cause trees and flowers to grow and so forth. Envision the type of environmental changes that manifest in Black and White, controlled instead via biofeedback.

The idea that seemed to have the most traction at this point was the idea of gardening. This led to the idea of “emotion gardening” in a garden of different types of highly emotional plants. The plants would need different types of “emotional fertilizer”, “emotion water”, and “emotion sunlight” to grow properly – the difference between a cactus and a water lily as an example – and the player would need to tend to them. I pictured the plants as being somewhat animated and anthropomorphic, like Pikmin but with a broader emotional toolset. The player is tasked with matching their emotion to that of the plant in order to nurture it and have it grow.

At this point, the question was asked ‘yes, but how do we make a game of it?’ We came up with the idea of “emotional DDR” (Dance Dance Revolution.) The problem with that idea was the speed and rapid matching nature of DDR; I couldn’t picture a series of emotions flowing downwards from the top of the screen quickly giving anything but (literal) headaches. “Happy-happy-happy-sad”…it just doesn’t work. So I came up with the idea of a fluid version of DDR, with a constant liquid flow from top to bottom. The various emotional states that came down the stream would be fluid, would have a gradient. Picture food coloring being poured into a stream and flowing downwards (at which point the player would be able to see them and react.) This would afford a lot of nice transition between the various emotional states. I also pictured the player having a mirror in front of them while doing this (which was one of the first exercises Nicole ran us through at the beginning of the tutorial.)

Now, combining all of our previous elements, we created the idea of a giant tending to his garden of emotional plants. Using the fluid, emotional DDR interface the player controls the emotions of the giant as he moves around the garden, tending to his various plants. The fluid is then analogous to the chemical cocktail flowing over the giant’s brain, affecting his mood. The giant’s mood would in turn provide the emotional fertilizer for the plants. I drew up a sample interface, which looked kind of like the scenes inside John Malkovich’s head from Being John Malkovich crossed with Plasma Pong:

Clearly, the giant needs to make sounds like Totoro from Miyazake’s “My Neighbor Totoro.”

On further reflection, it also seems like it could be interesting to somehow monitor both the player’s intended and unintended emotional shifts, and work those into the stream of colors. Nicole, when talking about monitoring players’ emotional shifts during play, points out that many emotional shifts are momentary and difficult to capture. Surprise, curiosity, and fiero – the “holy grail of emotion in games” – are fleeting, momentary in physical manifestation. But if the device we’re using to capture player emotion is “running at 60hz so we can effectively capture brief facial displays emotion like surprise, curiosity, or amusement” we could do some really neat things with it.