Emotion is so core to our lives that we believe it's the ultimate game design purpose.

This mindset puts you in a situation where you either seek the impossible or make your game simply one of many other emotion-triggering sources. You need to frame emotion as a tool and not as your purpose. By doing it, you can understand emotions' power and limitations and leverage them best without relying on false beliefs and correlations.

This week, I'll show you 3 reasons why emotion is not the purpose of games (and art in general) so you can shift your focus to more effective and productive game design goals.

Emotions won't make a game good, but they can highlight the best in it.

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Here they are:

• You Can’t Engineer Specific Emotions Triggering
• Anyone Can Feel Emotions From Anything
• Emotion-Oriented Art Makes Art Replaceable

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

#1: You Can’t Engineer Specific Emotions Triggering

The human being is not a machine.

This might sound obvious to you, but there seem to be people who believe, or at least imply, the opposite. These people think a game designer can “engineer a specific emotion” into the game.

I’m sorry, but this is impossible since you would need to assume that every player will respond in the same way to the same stimulus. Also, the underlying concept seems that emotions reside somewhat “inside the game” as an intrinsic value. But our perception of reality is mediated by cultural symbols.

A designer can nudge people into feeling a specific emotion because, culturally, people react in some way. However, it’s all about a statistical percentage (which you can’t ever know), and it dramatically changes between cultures.

There’s no “world culture” unless you make gross simplifications (that makes the concept useless).

But even individually, the variance is so huge that it makes the approach go nowhere.

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The game is not the only variable influencing an emotional state.

Playing is as common as a complex activity. So, many factors influence the response to the play stimulus.

Imagine yourself playing a game and feeling a particular emotion. Why did you feel that emotion and not others?

There’s no answer, of course, but here are some factors that may have influenced it:

• Your genetics
• Where you’re playing
• Your current mood
• The culture you live in
• The historical context you’re in
• Your knowledge
• Etc.

Search for Paul Ekman if you want to deepen how the Emotional State works.

We’re all human beings, but many things make us different from one another.

It’s called subjectivity, and it’s very much a factor in art.

#2: Anyone Can Feel Emotions From Anything

Emotions are not only an “art thing”.

Emotions guide the vast majority of our day-to-day decision-making. And we’re not the only ones made like that.

Studies (that trace back even to Charles Darwin) make clear that animals can feel a broad spectrum of emotions like us. Also, if you have a pet, you’ll probably relate a lot to this. You’ve probably seen it crying, being happy, or scared. Since emotion is a crucial survival tool, we use it for everything.

It allows us to better understand what’s around us and how to respond to it. Every world interaction can cause you one or more emotions, so it’s not a characteristic of art.

However, you might think that Artistic Emotions are different.

But that’s not true.

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Artistic emotions have nothing special.

Did you ever feel an emotion watching a mathematical equation? For me, no, but I know some people who would answer, “Yeah, absolutely!”.

Some people feel a sense of completeness watching Euler’s Identity. The reason is that it holds all the fundamental math symbols in an elegant equation. Others feel a sense of mystery and admiration watching Einstein’s Field Equations of General Relativity.

The source of an emotion doesn’t change the characteristics of that emotion. As Nelson Goodman writes in his book Languages of Art: “The Mondrian and the Webern ar not obviously more emotive than Newton’s or Einstein’s laws; and a line between emotive and cognitive is less likely to make off the aesthetic objects and experiences from others. All these troubles revive the temptation to posit special aesthetic emotion or feeling or a special coloration of other emotions occurring in aesthetic experiences. This special emotion or coloring may be intense when other emotions are feeble, may be positive when they are negative, and may occur in experience of the most intellectual art and yet be lacking in the most stirring scientific study. All difficulties are resolved—by begging the question. No doubt aesthetic emotions have the property that makes them aesthetic.”

Now let’s end with something that reveals why emotion as a purpose is even dangerous.

#3: Emotion-Oriented Art Makes Art Replaceable

Emotions can be easily highjacked with technology.

Let’s fast forward into the future. You can connect yourself to a machine that releases electrochemical impulses in your brain.

Through an input device, you can choose whatever emotion to feel by just pressing a button. It’s basically an emotion generator on command. Since, as we’ve said before, artistic emotions have nothing unique, that would be exactly like experiencing a work of art. Would you consider that emotion generator functionality the same as playing a videogame, watching a movie, or starring in front of the Mona Lisa?

I bet your answer is no, but if instead you see no difference, be ready to forget art as you know it. If emotion were the purpose of art, all the ways we make works of art nowadays would be inefficient, and there would be no reason to use them.

That emotion-generating device would be enough to replace all the works of art in human history in a single instant.

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Emotions are a terrible judge of quality.

Let’s get back to the present and see that the future can be even worse. The belief that emotions are the purpose often leads to false equations like “This game is good because it made me cry”. But if that were the case, all games could be beautiful very easily. All you need is to add a sequence where, for example, a someone is crying, or a dog is being clubbed.

It would be tough to hold back tears for many of us. And that’s true, but it says absolutely nothing about the quality of the work.

Now imagine using this criterion with the emotion-generating device.

Emotions are a bad purpose as they are indeed a powerful tool.

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Key Takeaways:

• The game is not the only variable influencing an emotional state.
• Emotions are not only an “art thing”.
• Emotions can be easily highjacked with technology.