Conveying Discomfort through Animation and 3D Character Model

Sammanfattning

Many video games make use of negative emotions to engage players and to introduce more meaningful game experiences. Discomfort is a feeling mostly used in the horror game genre, and our aim is to research how we can convey a feeling of discomfort through a narrative game, where we focus on the discomfort of the main character reflected through visuals. During our research our main focus was on a silhouette of a character model, in-game animations and cutscenes. We will be using the Iterative Design framework and Reflective Game Design framework to explore this idea. To showcase our research we are using a compiled KAPPA method, we have worked on 3 individual papers that all connect in the first section of the KAPPA. The KAPPA concluded that it is more challenging to convey a feeling of discomfort through a player character as it is a small piece of the game. Paper II and Paper III’s findings however, partially support that animations can contribute to conveying a feeling of discomfort through a player character, but the studies were made in the context of an isometric narrative game therefore it might not fully apply to other types of games.