 The ground trembles in its wake, a walking colossus. At first glance it seems benign, almost innocent. Wander turns into determination as you ascend the beast, and a booming orchestral score intervenes to punctuate the climb. The battle is tense, but you triumph as all heroes seemingly do, filling you with a sense of pride and accomplishment. After felling the beast though, haunting melancholy music accompanies its languid collapse, and our triumphant euphoria quickly turns into guilt. We aren't the hero, we are consumed by forces beyond our control. This metaphor rapidly turns literal when what remains of this behemoth rushes into us, and you are whisked away to repeat this heinous act once again. This now famous loop in Shadow of the Colossus is memorable for many reasons, but chief amongst them is the emotional journey it carries you through. All fear, challenge, triumph, euphoria, guilt, and isolation are all tacitly if not explicitly explored by the game, and it does this by focusing on design subtleties very few games do. Amita Weda, famous to use as a design philosophy called design by subtraction, where any element not integral to the core theme of a game is removed. Mechanics, music, framing techniques, and visual effects all play a part in rendering this landscape, but when we view the experience from the mind of the player, these contrivances wash away to reveal the emotional core at the heart of the experience. Emotions are not self-evidently where you might start from as a designer, with mechanics being the most prominent lens for design. However, many of the greatest moments from gaming's collective unconscious are mediated by emotions, whether it be when we lost a certain character in Final Fantasy 7, or when those zombified dogs jumped at us in the original Resident Evil. Our priorities for design, though, seem to be changing. In his book, The Art of Game Design, Jesse Shell's first lens of design is the lens of emotion, which he argues is necessary to craft memorable experiences. In any case, the reason for our strange priorities might stem from the fact that our medium has historically been a technology and player-oriented one first, giving it a limited repertoire of emotions. This is clearly evidenced by how we delineate our genres, first-person shooters, real-time strategy and puzzle games amongst them, most of which are drawn in mechanical lines. Compare this to a medium like Cinema, which classifies its experiences in accordance with the core emotions they convey. This doesn't mean emotions have been entirely neglected by designers, it's just that the focus has been around those that are native to our medium. In his talk at GDC on the design of Journey, Jenova Chen outlines how we need to branch out from the emotions of joy, fun, triumph and empowerment if we want to explore more nuanced ideas in games. His studio, That Game Company, is known for crafting intense cathartic experiences, the reason for which is contained in their design philosophy, designing by emotion. With Flower, the team wanted to communicate the poetic ideal of unity between nature's beauty and humankind's industry, and they did this by crafting an experience built around flowing motion controls, dynamic music, and mechanics that focus on rejuvenation. Journey is an interactive parable built around finding solace in the presence of others, as we go on the proverbial hero's journey, and so it similarly employed mechanics, music and narrative framing devices to create the experience. Chen explains how the team went to painstaking lengths to map the emotional arc of the game, whether it be the physical geography, the color palette, the fluidity of the mechanics, or the pacing. In her GDC talk, Precision of Emotion, Erin Hoffman argues for a new classification scheme for games, one that is rooted in the core emotions that they convey. The most pervasive emotion in games is what she calls Sophia, a process that takes a player from a state of uncertainty to competence. But she expands this process to other thematic emotions including love, complicity and fear. A game like Papers, Please uses guilt, dissonance and moral dumbfounding to get players to wallow in indecision, and it does this with its mechanics and narrative. Another popular framework comes from Nicola Zaro and her Four Keys of Fun framework. In it, she outlines how there is such a thing as hard fun, easy fun, people fun and serious fun, which games can invoke in different measure. Either way, both express more nuanced ways of understanding, classifying and designing games, empowering us with a richer set of tools. However, if we push deeper into the realm of psychology, we find different ways emotions can express themselves, which has some interesting implications for game design. In his book, The Archaeology of Mind, Jacques Panksepp argues that we have discrete emotional circuitry that activates based on evolutionary triggers. And contrary to our propensity to separate reason from feelings, emotions are an integral part of our capacity to think. Furthermore, these emotions express themselves in very predictable ways, allowing us to design scenarios that invoke them. For example, to activate fear, we need to make people feel weak, disempowered and plagued with uncertainty. And so limiting players' resources, using reduced lighting, obscuring objects and making it hard to attack enemies, are potent mechanical ways of eliciting fear. Horror games like Resident Evil and Outlast do an exceptional job at this, making players feel parallel at the sight of foes. A complementary but contrasting view to this comes from a theory called the two-factor theory of emotion, which suggests that emotions are actually not generative, but labels for a generalized activation of tension. Any stimulus can be labeled with a different emotion based on the context. For example, the tension of Rez's gameplay can induce a synesthetic trance, because the music labels this with a transcendent electronic verb, and the visuals give it a psychedelic energy. The aggressive synths and guitars of Doom's soundtrack works us up into an aggressive frenzy, not to mention the demonic iconography and push-forward combat. Either way, the context changes the emotions at play, which gives designers versatility with the emotions they convey. Neither of these views conflict with what Genova said in his talk, which is that games are both capable of generating native emotions, but also using framing devices to alter the way we feel. In this GDC talk, the speakers conducted experiments to show how just by simply altering the music of a game, the emotions it elicits can fundamentally change. However, it is also true that other visual and mechanical elements can impact the play experience. In reality, mechanics, visuals, music, narrative, and framing all come to bear when designing games. There are problems with thinking of emotions in this highly scientific and reductive way. First, it is very difficult to silo emotions and view them as rigid categories, and there are certainly emotions that can't quite be reduced to words. For example, the Last Guardian effectively invokes love, friendship, and dependency by presenting you with an escort character who you rely on, and must work with to escape the predicament you are in. The designers also deliberately made his AI unresponsive to make him feel more real, further enhancing the immersion. In a technical sense, the designers did a fantastic job at using mechanics, visuals, and sound to create a bond between you and him, invoking our love circuitry. Yet words can't quite capture the feelings of the journey. Is it contemplative unity, haunting alienation, or maybe imperiled intimidation? You tell me what the emotions at play here are. Secondly, emotions very rarely remain isolated from one another, as they interact in sometimes unpredictable ways. Going back to Junova Chen, he highlights how the team delayed journey an additional year because the emotions they were generating were insufficiently intense. The trick was to think of emotions as a sequence and how contrasting a positive emotion with a negative one actually enhances both of them. Emotions are not experienced in isolation, they are a part of a landscape of experience that needs to be managed and playtested. And so towards the end, the sequence where you fly with kinetic freedom was preceded by an arduous section with restricted motion to enhance the impact of both. The problem with this kind of design is that it is very difficult to playtest, and very rarely do you get informed opinions about why people feel the way they do. If emotions are primary and in some sense intangible, explaining them using words becomes very difficult. There are also subtle ways emotions can transition between each other. For example, many stealth games use fear as a driving emotion, giving the player a narrative context for avoiding enemies. However, if we take a game like Batman Arkham Asylum, the emotions subtly shift to a predatory one. You are now using stealth as a lion would, and so it is a different emotion, what Panksepp calls seeking. Based purely on the context, stealth mechanics can invoke terror, euphoria, or anticipation, revealing the intricacies of emotional design. This can be seen very clearly in how the developers of Subnautica shifted their game from exploration to horror because there is intrinsic terror to the idea of diving under the sea. Emotional design helped them prioritize what was good about their game, and hone in on it. Another example of this is how anger can quickly be transferred into euphoria, seen in how games of extreme difficulty generate a sense of accomplishment. Once again, the severity of the low frames the impact of the high, and this can be tied into the narrative of the game. For example, Devil May Cry 3's hardest boss fights are with your brother Virgil, unifying the narrative gameplay and emotional peaks in one fell swoop. These boss fights also punctuate the end of each act, mirroring journeys mapping off an emotional experience to a player's engagement with the game. This phenomena can also be played with in subversive ways to reframe the native emotions of our medium. For example, Celeste is a fairly difficult puzzle platformer that invokes many of the inherent emotions of our medium, but by using the framing devices at their disposal, the developers change the game into one of melancholy contemplation and overcoming depression. Firstly, the music features calming synths that alleviate the tension of the game, and the visual style compliments this as well. Also, despite the difficulty, there is an assist mode that supplements the challenge with accommodation. Finally, the narrative of the game takes emotions like triumphant fun and channels it into a tale about confronting anxiety. The gameplay of the game can stand on its own, but I would argue that it's the emotional design of the game that made it so memorable. For me, the waiter might be the man who popularized this design sensibility, his version of it being designed by subtraction. Eco famously removed your health bar to tie your well-being to your escort character, and the game went on to inspire people like Hidetaka Miyazaki, Hideo Kojima, and That Game Company. That Game Company raised the profile of emotional design even further, and we now see many others try to replicate their success. One could even argue that the entire walking simulator genre has, at its core, emotions as a driving philosophy. Dear Esther, one of the first of these types of games, has a very different emotional palette, including rumination, contemplation, existential reflection, and regret. Gone Home, a game where you play a woman who has returned home to find it abandoned, creates an emotional resonance that is informed by the environment. The designers try to invoke nostalgia and more relatable forms of fear through the mundane environment of a conventional home, and they did this with great success. Again, the emotional arc of the game is difficult to put into words, but it drives much of the experience. Another emotion we can identify here is curiosity, what Brian Opton called interpretive play, and this serves as the governing emotion of games like Limbo, Insight, and even Dark Souls. In any case, many of these emotionally-driven experiences are finding a hard time with our propensity for mechanical classification, which is why we are stuck with walking simulator and 2D platformer for experiences as nuanced as Gone Home and Insight. Understanding the emotional subtext of games is important not just from a design perspective, but also giving room for different experiences to be appreciated for what they are. Emotional design requires we take a new phenomenological perspective when it comes to crafting games. In other words, we have to see the games through the experience of the player. Again, Genova Chen suggests this is hard because we cannot experience things for the first time ourselves. Emotions are mediated by novelty and, more notoriously, subjectivity. A game like the Stanley Parable gets us to contemplate on purpose and free will, but the framing of its environment is enhanced if the player understands the subtext of workplace monotony. God of War's father's son tale is relatable to all, but takes a more pronounced role in the lives of people who have gone through fatherhood themselves. The problem becomes even more pronounced when we think of designing emotions for social experiences, as we now have multiple perspectives to worry about. In a mechanical sense, we have competitive games that generate a particular suite of emotions, but also cooperative games that many argue in gender camaraderie, friendship, and unity. These are what we can call social emotions, and another emotion that is native to games. However, Chen cautions us about taking this form of design for granted. In Journey, they wanted to get people to genuinely care about one another, but this was much more difficult than it seems. Moving on one-on-one interactions prevents weird group dynamics, allowing for people to play the game solo and not depend on another, made sure people didn't resent each other, and removing all interface elements, explicit genders, and violent verbs, made sure the play space was constrained enough to get people to care about each other. Furthermore, the isolated context and mechanics where your abilities improved in the presence of others all reinforced the core theme of the game, that of unity and togetherness. Descending for the first time into Blighttown is as oppressive as it is difficult. You can hardly see anything, there are enemies that can poison you, and you make your way down perilous walkways with no end in sight. This level in Dark Souls is by far the most polarizing, with many arguing that it is broken, but what can't be denied is how everyone who played the game has an opinion on it. It has an undeniable emotional resonance, it is oppressive, mysterious, and intimidating, and has seared itself into our emotional subconscious. According to Chen, intensity is catharsis, it is the impact an emotion has on you that mediates its remembrance. In Spec Ops the line, there is a now infamous scene where you are forced to use white phosphorus to dispense with your enemies. Normally, murder happens from a distance, we see death as an abstraction. In this instance though, we are made to walk through the ruin we have left in our way, and revel in our guilt. It is an emotional gut punch that was profound because it was framed a specific way. When theme and mechanics unite to craft emotional experiences, the outcome can be quite powerful. In some sense, futility is built into video games, it is another native emotion of our medium. We stave off death as much as we can, but we all inevitably die. However, the beautiful thing about games is that we can respawn, we can live our redemption just by pressing a button. In the Tetris effect, the developers took these emotions of futility and triumph, and grafted it onto a visual interface that fills us with a new emotion, hope. We are playing a version of Tetris that has been fused with the aesthetics of Rez and the themes of Journey, as we live out humanity's creative arc in mechanical form. When Giant Sparrow went about designing what remains of Edith Finch, they sought to bridge the divide between the happy and the melancholy, the comedic and the tragic. Motivated by the core emotions of awe, wonder and transcendence, the developers crafted interactive vignettes that spoke to the nature of death in powerful ways. The most impactful of these scenarios, at least according to me, has some fascinating things to say about games in general. You are in a cannery, chopping fish, it's mundane drudgery. Maybe it's abject boredom, maybe it's psychosis. One world has you mechanized to the point of non-existence. The other transports you to a fantastical realm where you are the hero. Our attention is divided even though our preferences are not. There is a bleeding effect, fiction is turning into reality and reality into fiction. Call us Plato, call us Hegel, but we are trapped by our own mind, as our heroic exploits turn from the isometric into first person. And then, we're dead. But then again, were we ever really alive? This one scene manages to map the emotional experience of our interaction with the medium itself as we are torn between realities. As the designers explained in their GDC talk, game players will happily march towards their own death if you command them to do so, and so we did. The scene manages to map emotions as complex as alienation, escapism, adventure, futility, free will, submission and hope by leveraging the tools of interactive design we all have at our disposal. This is the strength of emotional design in video games, not just to enhance what we are already good at, or to explore new concepts, but to peer into what it means to be human. At the end of his talk, Jenova Chen shared a letter from a fan, a 15-year-old girl who recently lost her dad. In the letter, she recalls how playing Journey with him stayed with her well after he died. I think Chen's concluding sentiments here perfectly capture what words hardly do justice to, just like emotions themselves. I want to thank you for the game that changed my life, the game whose beauty bring tears to my eyes, Journey is quite possible the best game I've ever played. I continue to play it and always remembering what joys it brought and the joy it continues to bring. I'm Sophia, I'm 15, and your game changed my life for better. And seeing this letter somehow it brought back to me about this fan art. I think it is what life is about. We are only here for such a short amount of time. We happen to be all living in the same era, and let's help each other, let's make each other's life better. And that's why I think as a game developer, that's the best thing we could do, and that's why I love making games. And that's why, you know.