Emotional involvement in digital games

Abstract

Digital games have become a pervasive aspect of the contemporary media landscape, yet our understanding of the way they engage players is limited. Experiential studies of games have the added complexity of plugging human consciousness in the cybernetic circuit that generates game play. Quite simply games require input from players in order to occur. The nature of this cybernetic circuit means that the forms of engagement enabled by digital games are considerably different from those of other non interactive media. This calls for theoretical models and analytical tools developed specifically with digital games in mind. This paper describes such a model which aims to enhance our understanding of digital game involvement. The model addresses a variety of experiential dimensions related to game play, but will here focus primarily on the affective dimension.