Emotionshop Museum is a suite of games designed to invoke one of seven different emotions: shame, pride, daring, gloating, hurt, serenity, and appreciation. Each of the games attempts to evoke the respective emotion through mechanics. We are exploring the relationship between mechanics and emotions.
Through our project, we not only want to give designers around the world a tool for manipulating the emotional flow of the game through game mechanics, but also to have designers think and discuss along the lines of coming up with their own set of mechanics that can evoke certain emotions.
About the author(s)
Emotionshop is a project at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center with the goal of exploring how game mechanics evoke emotions. Like our predecessor, the Experimental Gameplay Project, our team of five prototypes as many games as possible, with each person making one game in 7 to 9 days centered around an emotional theme. So far, we have done 28 games for 7 different emotions, namely, serenity, gloating, shame, daring, pride, hurt, and appreciation (click the emotions to see other posts). Just like how there are art and music theory on the emotional effects of visual and audio choices, we hope to start a conversation on what kinds of interactions are more effective in evoking certain emotions, what kinds are not, and why.