Beyond Satisfaction: Game Feel Design for Emotionally Impactful Experiences

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand the connections between two previously disjoint subfields of game research and design: 1) the study of emotionally impactful games and 2) the study of game feel. Regarding games and emotion, we now understand aspects such as how negative emotions are appreciated in games and can be a desirable quality for designers and players alike. We also understand aspects of game feel such as the importance of responsive player character control and juicy (i.e. exaggerated) feedback for player actions. However, the literature on game feel rarely links to emotion research and focuses on a narrow subset of emotions/feelings such as satisfaction and control. Research is lacking on how game feel design can impact a wider palette of emotions, including negative ones, and how this may require one to "break the rules" of good game feel design, e.g., making it purposefully hard to control the player character. We bridge this gap by employing Constructivist Grounded Theory Analysis to understand a dataset comprising of interview data from 15 participants and 116 game mechanics from a diverse selection of games such as Journey, Celeste, and Freedom Bridge. Through this, we propose Expectation Modulation as the core theory to capture how game feel can elicit emotional experiences. Additionally, we identify 9 design techniques as central to crafting emotional experiences through game feel design.