Multiplayer gaming research has most often been examined from a prosocial perspective due to its benefits in encouraging cooperative behaviors. Apart from online toxicity research, negatively-valenced dynamics are less studied. To explore these types of multiplayer experiences, we conducted an exploratory survey through the lens of what players considered “emotionally challenging” in their gaming experiences relating to the game’s social, narrative, and difficulty elements. We discovered interaction patterns in recounted multiplayer experiences that we named prosocial and anti-social dynamics, which helped us refine the definition of “social challenge” itself. We also found that it was common for multiplayer experiences to inspire reflection on one’s decisions, skill level, playstyles, and relationships. We also found support for tandem play experiences. We argue that these findings reveal venues for further research into those topics to expand our knowledge on social and emotional challenge in multiplayer experiences.

Emotional challenge contrasts with the common perspective of challenge in games. The latter focuses on performance, while the former focuses on presenting players with heavy themes that induce complex emotions. To explore how emotional challenge impacts the player experience, we examined the relationship between player reflection and affective game design patterns—conducting a survey with 53 respondents that prompted recalling an emotionally challenging situation in a video game. We then scored perceived emotional challenge ratings and coded the responses according to referenced affective game design patterns to categorize levels of reflection achieved. We found a significant difference (p < 0.011) in emotional challenge ratings and mean ranks increased across the five reflection groups, from lowest reflective level (non-reflective description) to highest (critical reflection). This demonstrates that the more emotionally challenged participants felt, the greater the depth of their reflection was. We also discovered the following design patterns to be prominently referenced in respective reflection levels: emotional decision-making, identification, and negative/uncomfortable feelings such as guilt.

Player challenge is core to the player experience in video games. While research on challenge and failure is on the rise, the granular components of failure in games are relatively understudied. While there are existing taxonomies outlining failure and its underlying conditions within games, these do not account for games without respawning mechanics, game genres outside of platformers, or interaction modalities beyond traditional 2D/3D digital video games. To address this, we observed and coded 50 virtual reality (VR) games across various genres to expand upon previously developed taxonomies towards identifying a more generalized set of design patterns for player failure and retries. VR game genres included shooters, rhythm games, MMOs, story-driven puzzles, and simulations. This ensured that the new expanded taxonomy would uncover as many challenge and failure design patterns across most games.Through the process of observation and coding, we found that there are three main components of the failure process in games: (1) Player Challenges, (2) Mini Failure Loop, and (3) Critical Failure State. Using this taxonomy with its detailed subcomponents could help determine how the overall structure of failure affects the player experience, as well as provide a new design language to describe challenge and the various levels of failure.

In games, failure that leads to death is a trope that players are all too familiar with. We were motivated by this to explore how altering the consequences of death on player progress affected aspects of the player experience. Specifically, our research investigated the relationship of death and respawning mechanics - precisely the location of respawn points - to player experience (PX) constructs, such as mastery, challenge, autonomy, curiosity, and immersion. We developed a simple 2D platformer game that only differed in respawn point locations: the start of the game (permadeath), the start of a level, the last reached checkpoint, and the last manually saved point. We report findings from a study with 72 participants that indicated modifying a respawn mechanic can lead to varying effects on PX and that different mechanics may be more effective for specific types of players (challenge- and goal-oriented). We then discuss the implications for targeted game design and opportunities for further research into death and respawning mechanics.

Tangible games afford an engaging and often unique form of hybrid play (i.e., physical-digital elements), but there is currently limited work explicitly exploring how these games can be designed to provide spatial affordances that implicitly encourage collaboration. In this paper, we present a novel collaborative tangible game, titled Mad Mixologist, and investigate how making a simple change in the location of game objects within the tangible play space can lead to significantly different collaborative interaction strategies. The results from our group comparison study indicate that 1) players with exclusively direct access to multiple relevant resources (i.e., a digital instruction and a physical object) were more likely to assume responsibility for completing tasks in a shared play space and 2) distributing these same task-relevant resources across multiple players created ambiguity over whether the player with the digital or physical resource should engage with the shared play space. This study demonstrates one possible way in which the physical design of a tangible game can be arranged to implicitly encourage players to develop more collaborative interaction strategies, specifically by distributing exclusive resources across players. Overall, this study highlights and reinforces the connection between spatial affordances and social interactions via embodied facilitation within the context of collaborative tangible games.