Stéphane Bura has posted an extensive and interesting study of player emotions in video game design. Bura presents theories, principles, speculations, and a pattern language of emotional game design, including numerous excellent graphics:

Emotion Engineering in Videogames
Toward a Scientific Approach to Understanding the Appeal of Videogames

Players don’t play to complete games, just as readers don’t read to finish books. Players play to feel emotions. Game design is experience crafting for the purpose of emotion engineering.
Game design is intrinsically hard because its output is an interactive system that is twice removed from its goal. The game designer produces rules for interaction that, with the participation of the player, generate game states that themselves induce emotions in the player.

If we can describe a given game state using a set of gameplay variables, we get the following cycle:

Stephan Bura: Game Design Cycle

Interactions between the player and the game produce changes in the gameplay variables.
For instance, finding a heart container in Zelda and getting a bigger full health bar obviously changes something in the game state. We’ll explore below what this could be.

Variations or stability of these variables induce emotions in the player.
For instance, having a bigger full health bar could make him more confident.

Player’s emotions influence how he interacts with the game.
For instance, being confident might make him take more risks; pride might keep him chasing a high score; or boredom might make him stop playing altogether.

… Game design works backwards around this cycle, trying to predict player emotions from changes in the interactive system. But our knowledge of the dependencies between interaction and emotion is so sparse that most changes require testing. Testing in part requires implementing the changes, which costs time and money. Thus, in a professional setting where budget is an issue, game design innovation can quickly become a risk.

- Stéphane Bura: Link.

Via Play This Thing!

Bura has labelled his essay “(v 1.0.1)”; I take this as a good sign, that he’ll continue to develop this already impressive work.