Mapping Emotional Blueprints - A Framework for Environmental Design in Games

Sammanfattning

This thesis investigates how psychogeography can be applied to the analysis and design of three-dimensional virtual game environments. Originating in studies of urbanspace, psychogeography examines how environments influence emotion, movement,perception, and behavior. This project adapts that concept to digital worlds, askinghow game spaces can produce affective experiences through spatial form, atmosphere,traversal, and interpretation rather than through explicit narrative exposition alone.The study is structured around three phases. First, a comparative qualitative analysis identifies the spatial and design characteristics that make a game world psychogeographically impactful. Drawing on psychogeography, environmental storytelling,affective design, and close reading methods, the thesis proposes four core criteria:spatial autonomy, atmospheric affect, player dérive, and affective coherence. Thesecriteria are used to distinguish between environments that function as active emotional systems and those whose emotional effects depend more heavily on cinematicor narrative control.Second, the thesis conducts an empirical affective testing phase using structuredself-report questionnaires. Participants responded to selected environments fromDark Souls, Journey, and ABZÛ. The questionnaire combines the Pleasure–ArousalDominance (PAD) emotional state model with discrete emotional descriptors andspatial attribution questions. The results suggest recurring relationships betweenemotional response and environmental features such as lighting, soundscape, spatialscale, openness, confinement, environmental framing, and movement rhythm. Whilethe sample is exploratory and not statistically generalizable, the findings supportthe argument that players often interpret emotional experience through spatial andatmospheric conditions.Finally, the thesis synthesizes the theoretical and empirical findings into the Emotional Blueprint Framework: a design-oriented model for understanding how virtual environments shape affective experience. The framework organizes psychogeographic design around five interrelated layers: spatial form, atmospheric systems,traversal structure, interpretive openness, and emotional tendencies. It also introduces a psychogeographic feedback loop in which spatial form influences emotionalresponse, emotional response shapes movement behavior, and movement producesinterpretation and renewed spatial perception. The thesis concludes that emotionally resonant game environments are not defined solely by visual quality, narrativecomplexity, or mechanical design, but by the way spatial systems and atmosphericcues encourage players to feel, move, remember, and interpret. By positioning threedimensional game environments as designed emotional landscapes, this work contributes to psychogeographic game studies, environmental storytelling, and affectivelevel design.