Emotion control of player characters: creating an emotionally responsive game

Unrestricted The gaming industry is diligently working to find ways to emotionally immerse players in games. Their goal is to evoke emotions in the player, such as empathy, to make the player feel more genuinely involved in the game experience. A large body of work, both theoretical and physical, has been done in this regard. However, in order to have an emotionally immersive game, the player and the game must be involved in an emotion dialogue. It must both evoke emotions (emotion output) and receive emotions (emotion input). To date, emotion input has been largely ignored by game designers, leaving games that “talk” emotionally at the player but do not “listen” to the player. This thesis explores emotion input by designing a game that prompts for and responds to player input of emotions to create a game that listens to the player emotionally. The hypothesis is that the capability to input emotions will create an emotionally responsive world that will facilitate player involvement and immersion.