Emotion in Games

Games have the ability to elicit all sorts of emotions in players and this is one of the main reasons people seek games. This chapter proposes a psychology-based framework to help game designers elicit emotion in players, simulate emotion in nonplayer characters, and interpret the players?> emotions. It reviews relevant psychological theories of emotion and computational models of emotion, and discusses their implications for games. Special emphasis is placed on appraisal theories of emotion. These theories and the framework for modeling emotion can be used to accomplish three things: (1) Systematically elicit emotions in players by manipulating features in the game world and characters in a way that influences how players appraise the ongoing interaction, (2) create characters that express believable emotions by endowing them with an appraisal-based model of emotion, and (3) interpret the players?> emotions during game play and infer their mental states from such emotional expressions.