An Inquiry of Emotions Related to the Exploring, Gathering, Building and Fighting Activities in Video Games

Sammanfattning: The four activities exploring, gathering, building and fighting are common across many genres of video games. Although these activities can come in many different forms such as fighting alone or in groups, against humans, beasts or fictional monsters, gathering sticks and stones to build a shelter or gathering cards to build the perfect deck, most games include at least one of these activities and some genres such as survival games include most of them. A test video game is used to allow participants to experience each activity and report discrete emotions felt during the activity. The purpose of this experiment is to find a link between each activity and a particular discrete emotion. Against our prediction, results indicate that rather than each activity being connected to a single discrete emotion, each activity leans towards either multiple positive emotions or multiple negative emotions.