Emotions, Technology, and Digital Games

Emotions, Technology, and Digital Games explores the need for people to experience enjoyment, excitement, anxiety, anger, frustration, and many other emotions. The book provides essential information on why it is necessary to have a greater understanding of the power these emotions have on players, and how they affect players during, and after, a game.

This book takes this understanding and shows how it can be used in practical ways, including the design of video games for teaching and learning, creating tools to measure social and emotional development of children, determining how empathy-related thought processes affect ethical decision-making, and examining how the fictional world of game play can influence and shape real-life experiences.

Details how games affect emotions—both during and after playDescribes how we can manage a player’s affective reactionsApplies the emotional affect to making games more immersiveExamines game-based learning and educationIdentifies which components of online games support socio-emotional developmentDiscusses the impact of game-based emotions beyond the context of games

I. FRAMEWORKS OF EMOTIONS IN GAMES

1. Science of Emotions in Design of Video Games 2. Gamers and Their Weapons: An Appraisal Perspective on Weapons Manipulation in Video Games 3. Communicating Emotion through Gestures in Online Games

II. EMOTIONAL AFFORDANCES IN GAMES

4. Educational Neuroscience and the Affective Affordances of Video Games in Language Learning

5. The Design and Field Evaluation of an Interactive Digital Game to Identify and Compare Preschool Children’s Social and Emotional Skills

6. The Role of Story in Learning and Emotions

7. What Kind of Narratives Do Kids Like for Video Games? An Exploratory Study of Children’s Cognitive and Emotional Responses

8. Which Socio-Emotional Skills Do Online Games Teach

9. CyGaMEs Analytics and Data Visualization: Case Studies Showing Affective Response to Learning through Instructional Video Games

10. The Role of Emotion and Empathy in Ethical Decision-Making in Videogames

III. EMOTIONS EXTENDED BY GAMES 11. Digital Narrative: Exploring Issues of PTSD in a Virtual Environment

12. Half a Second That It Is Enough: Involuntary Micro-suspensions of Disbelief and Ectodiegesis as Phenomena of Immersional Processes in Pervasive Games

13. Emotional Response to Gaming Producing Rosenblatt’s Transaction