Summary
A game is a system for creating experiences from player choices, and emotions are the most memorable part of those experiences. An emotion is intense but short: a transient physiological reaction to a trigger. Designers can’t put an emotion into a game; they design the triggers (a rule, a moment, a sound, a pause) and the conditions under which those triggers are likely to work on a given player. This page collects frameworks for doing that deliberately: emotion families, arousal, emotion through mechanics, and pacing.
Key ideas
Systems, experiences, emotions
- A game is a system for creating experiences, based on player choices.
- An experience is a way of perceiving reality: direct, sensual and built up through practice.
- An emotion is a short, intense reaction to a trigger.
This echoes Schell’s point that the designer builds the artefact while the experience happens in the player (Schell, The Art of Game Design, see source-art-of-game-design). In practice: a design document should say what triggers the emotion, when, and why it should work on this player, not just “the player feels sad”.
Emotion families as design jobs
Ekman’s (1992) list of basic emotions had six: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. The later Atlas of Emotions (Ekman and Ekman, 2016) groups emotions into five universal families: enjoyment, anger, fear, sadness and disgust. Each is a different design job:
| Emotion | Typical triggers in games | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Enjoyment | Triumph, delight, relief, amusement | Reaching Celeste’s summit (fiero) |
| Anger | Unfairness, rivals, a cheap death | Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis orcs: anger as motivation |
| Fear | Threat, vulnerability, scarcity, the unknown | Alien: Isolation, Amnesia |
| Sadness | Losing something the player cared about or invested in | Lee in Telltale’s The Walking Dead |
| Disgust | Rot, bodies, betrayal; often paired with fear | A Plague Tale’s rats |
Surprise, dropped from the 2016 families, still matters to designers: it drives curiosity and incongruity humour (see surprise, humour-in-game-design). Lazzaro’s lazzaro-four-keys offer a play-centred alternative: hard fun, easy fun, serious fun and people fun, each with its own emotions.
Arousal has a sweet spot
Yerkes and Dodson (1908) found that performance rises with stimulation up to a point and then falls. Applied to players: too little arousal is boredom, too much is panic and performance collapses; players do best, and often enjoy most, in between (see neurochemical-engagement and flow). Emotion design is partly arousal management: horror pushes players up the curve on purpose and then gives them a safe room; a joke after a tense peak brings arousal down so the next peak can land.
Emotion through mechanics
The strongest emotions often come from what the player did, not what they watched:
| Game | The mechanic | The feeling |
|---|---|---|
| Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons | One stick per brother for the whole game; near the end, the controls of the lost brother take on new meaning | Grief, felt through the controller |
| Papers, Please | Rules you must enforce and too little money to feed your family | Guilt and complicity |
| Shadow of the Colossus | Huge, often peaceful creatures; victory music that sounds like mourning | Doubt about winning |
| Journey | A stranger you can only chirp at, who can help you fly | Companionship without words |
In practice
- Name the emotion and the trigger for each key moment in your design: what happens, when, and why it should work.
- Plan the curve. Map intended emotional intensity over a level or session, with peaks and valleys (interest-curves, rhythm-of-play).
- Use mechanics before cutscenes. Ask what the player could do that would produce the feeling.
- Respect the player’s state. Fear needs vulnerability; sadness needs prior investment; anger at unfairness drives players away rather than motivating them.
- Test for it. Watch faces and listen during playtesting; ask players what they felt and when.
Evidence
- The course lecture series frames games as systems for creating experiences, uses five core emotions as design jobs, and applies the Yerkes–Dodson curve to explain why humour works as a release after tension (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures).
- Yerkes and Dodson’s original 1908 study used mice and the strength of a stimulus in a discrimination task; the general “arousal and performance” curve is a later interpretation of that work, widely used but simplified.
Implications
- Emotion design links psychology to every other design layer: narrative (narrative-design), level pacing (level-design), sound (sound-design-basics) and feedback (game-feel).
- Different players react differently to the same trigger: emotion design is also audience design (see player-centric-design).
Open questions
- How universal are “basic” emotions? Ekman’s universality claims are debated, and games travel across cultures.
- Can a designer reliably produce sadness or guilt, or only create conditions in which some players feel it?
Related
- lazzaro-four-keys — four clusters of play emotion
- fiero — the triumph emotion
- humour-in-game-design — designing for laughter
- neurochemical-engagement — arousal and the Yerkes–Dodson curve
- flow — challenge matched to skill
- interest-curves — pacing emotional intensity
- immersion-models — immersion and emotional investment
- surprise — expectation and its violation
- source-player-psychology-lectures