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Emotional agency in storygames

Published: 07 August 2018 Publication History

Abstract

This paper explores the use of Weir's concept of emotional agency as a way to understand how agency can arise when players make meaningful decisions bearing emotional significance, regardless of whether these actions have major consequences. Through close readings of The Wolf Among Us, Kentucky Route Zero and Oxenfree, we suggest that emotional agency is linked to an illusion of agency on a local level, and a sense of affection towards the characters. However, emotional agency is potentially in conflict with global agency, when the desire to traverse other narrative routes is constrained by a player's sense of affection for the playable character. Based on these observations, we propose that emotional agency arises when moment-to-moment choices and responses, bearing sentimental value, accumulate to form a sense of attachment to characters in a game or interactive story.

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  • (2024)Conversational Interactions with NPCs in LLM-Driven Gaming: Guidelines from a Content Analysis of Player FeedbackChatbot Research and Design10.1007/978-3-031-54975-5_10(167-184)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2024
  • (2021)Rotten and Possessed: Control and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice as Models of Outmersive Game DesignProceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3465336.3475094(35-44)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2021
  • (2020)A (Visual) Novel Route to Learning: A Taxonomy of Teaching Strategies in Visual NovelsProceedings of the 15th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3402942.3403004(1-13)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2020
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cover image ACM Other conferences
FDG '18: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
August 2018
503 pages
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 07 August 2018

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Author Tags

  1. agency
  2. choice
  3. close readings
  4. consequence
  5. emotional agency

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  • Research-article

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FDG '18
FDG '18: Foundations of Digital Games 2018
August 7 - 10, 2018
Malmö, Sweden

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FDG '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 39 of 95 submissions, 41%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Conversational Interactions with NPCs in LLM-Driven Gaming: Guidelines from a Content Analysis of Player FeedbackChatbot Research and Design10.1007/978-3-031-54975-5_10(167-184)Online publication date: 13-Mar-2024
  • (2021)Rotten and Possessed: Control and Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice as Models of Outmersive Game DesignProceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3465336.3475094(35-44)Online publication date: 30-Aug-2021
  • (2020)A (Visual) Novel Route to Learning: A Taxonomy of Teaching Strategies in Visual NovelsProceedings of the 15th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3402942.3403004(1-13)Online publication date: 15-Sep-2020
  • (2018)Perceived Agency as Meaningful Expression of Playable Character Personality Traits in StorygamesInteractive Storytelling10.1007/978-3-030-04028-4_23(230-239)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2018

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