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A while ago i Sniper Lite was the most popular free game in the iPhone app store. It reminded me of a subject that has puzzled my mind for a long time. I like a good FPS - check out the post about Far Cry 2 - yet I have always been amazed at the fascination of this genre, and its players, with 'head shots', i.e. representations of exploding (human) heads. From the perspective of designing player experiences, there is undoubtedly an emotional trigger there. But why is this imagery so powerful?

In my interpretation, the emotional anatomy of head shots is a combination of two things, which could be identified as 1) goal-related and 2) culture-related.

First, a head shot stands for a display of skill in relation to a goal. If one can make a head shot, it signifies instant kill by hitting a small target from a distance. In game contexts, this can be called 'effectance from distance', i.e. the player is able to see that his actions have an effect in the world of the game, and this is often pleasurable in itself. Furthermore, when this is tied to the aspect of skill, the achievement becomes even more glorious. This the goal-related, game design part.

Second, the image of an exploding head is heavily infested with cultural meanings: the JFK murder, and other war and news footage. The explosion of a human head from a bullet is an iconographic image that some games revel on. In terms of emotion theory, it seems that a lot of hours are spent in the game industry in designing the eliciting conditions - the conditions under which a particular emotion can be triggered - of head shots.

This brings us to another tangent of the matter, which is the aesthetics of head shots; how they look and feel. The imagery - an animation, in practice - of an exploding head relates to both the goal and skill, as a visual reward, and to cultural dimension as a recognizable visual trope. Together, these aspects make for a powerful emotional design. There is a strange, disturbing sense of gratification in making the head shot. It is emotionally amplified by the fact that it produces an aesthetic sensation, presented as a reward and a feedback for one's actions in the game's world.

I would love to hear Slavoj Zizek's psychoanalytical take on this. Especially because if one looks at gaming forums, head shots are discussed trivially without any reflection of what such images are about, and what they tell about the emotional spaces - and ideologies - of such game designs.

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