The Emotional Impact of Video Games

Abstract

Abstract The thesis aimed to study the emotional impact of video games and how these emotions shape the experience of the gaming. Data are from a case study and comprise both automatic facial coding of emotional expression and qualitative interviews. The facially expressed emotions were analyzed by means of a computer program named FaceReader. The results indicate that video games elicit a wide and partly unpredictable range of emotions, with anger and surprise as the two most dominant emotions, but also those most dependent on the kind of game being played. Sadness, on the other hand, seems hardly to have been experienced at all. The participant also ignores physical pain in order to keep playing one of her favourite games. We also found that emotions may be secondary to the feeling of accomplishment when it comes to enjoying and replaying a video game.