Cole, Tom and Gillies, Marco. 2022. 'Emotional Exploration and the Eudaimonic Gameplay Experience: A Grounded Theory'. In: CHI '22: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New Orleans, LA, United States 30 April - 5 May 2022. [Conference or Workshop Item]

Preview

Text EmotionalExplorationEudaimonicGamePlayExperience_ColeGillies.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial. Download (656kB) | Preview

Abstract or Description

Research on the emotional experience of playing videogames has increased in recent years, yet much of this work is focused on the hedonistic player experience (PX) commonly associated with the nebulous concept of ‘fun’ and positive affect. Researchers are increasingly paying more attention to the eudaimonic PX commonly associated with ‘appreciation’, mixed-affect and reflection. To further investigate eudaimonic PX we interviewed 24 games players about ‘significant or memorable emotional experiences’ from their games playing and used grounded theory to analyse their responses. This led to the construction of the concept of ‘emotional exploration’ which is used to help explain (i) why players would seek out a eudaimonic PX, (ii) how eudaimonic PX is constituted and (iii) how developers can design for a eudaimonic PX. We further make the case for the ‘eudaimonic gameplay experience’ to be realised as different and separate to pre-existing notions of eudaimonic entertainment.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502002
Additional Information:	This work was partially funded by EPSRC grant EP/L015846/1 (IGGI).
Keywords:	videogames, gameplay, mixed affect, grounded theory, eudaimonia, emotions
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Computing
Dates:	Date Event 1 May 2022 Accepted 5 May 2022 Published
Event Location:	New Orleans, LA, United States
Date range:	30 April - 5 May 2022
Item ID:	31843
Date Deposited:	16 May 2022 10:15
Last Modified:	17 May 2022 07:13
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/31843

View statistics for this item...

Edit Record (login required)