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I have been playing Far Cry 2. I find it fascinating, not least because of that old experiential friend of ours: Immersion. In terms of emotional game design, Far Cry 2 is a fine example of a particular set of eliciting conditions for emotions, designed into a seamless simulation of a world with events, agents, and objects. I'll spend a few paragraphs stargazing at how Africa has been designed for game play.

In an Escapist feature, Adam LaMosca describes his experiences with the game. He touches upon many points that I find fascinating in the game as well. What I intend to do here, is to introduce a set of concepts with which to pinpoint the game design elements that affect the play experience, and make it particular.

I suggest that we can do a quick reading of how Far Cry 2 creates emotional tension by identifying the events, agents, and objects in its world. This allows us to identify which kinds of emotions the game elicits, - emotions being valenced reactions to aspects of events, agents, and objects. If we continue to analyze the relations of these elements, we see how the game play experience as a whole becomes more then a sum of those elements and their manifestations in game play.

Fire as an event

In general, Far Cry 2 has events in the form of game play - traversing the world, doing the missions, fighting, and so on. According to a model of emotions I was studying in my PhD., events evoke so-called prospect-based emotions. This means that in games, they are closely tied to the design of goals. So, in FC2 the emotions related to events tie into us monitoring our progress towards a goal, such as a particular mission. Missions are goal structures, and thus they drive us towards the emotional play experience of the game.

Besides the direct gameplay, there are events that are due to how the game simulates a world. There is weather, and the cycle of day. The most interesting one of these is how FC2 handles fire. It is not only the fact that the dry land is easy to set in flames, and there are many objects that afford that, but also that fire has a powerful emotional potential. It is a force of nature but also a metaphor for many things. Fire is bound to evoke emotions, and its behavior has been captured in FC2 powerfully.

Fire as an agent

Fire presents a segway to another focal point of emotions: agents in the world. The power of fire here is that it is both an event and agent in the Africa of FC2. Obviously the guards, and other bounty hunters present agents in the form of characters - each time one sees a non-player character in the largely open and desolate world of FC2, it evokes an emotion - in this design case, a feeling of danger and threat.

The buddy characters are more complex in the sense that they can also evoke empathy, caring for their fortunes and prospects, rather than only one's own prospects. Over all of this looms the Jackal character, who embodies the ultimate goal of the game.

Regarding the aesthetics of Africa, i.e. how one is able to sense and experience this particular approximation of Africa, and its beauty, there is one more interesting class of agents: the animals. Seeing a pack of gnus or zebras, or catching an antelope into the sights of your sniper rifle arguably elicits an emotional response. These can be categorized to so-called attraction emotions, which range from approving
to disapproving - in the case of the animals, I find myself approving them through the emotion of admiration.

Diamonds are your friends

Finally, the world of FC2 has objects - diamonds, weapons, and vehicles that make attaining the goals of the game easier. Reactions to aspects of objects vary on the scale of liking and disliking - these emotions manifest themselves most clearly in the personal preferences of using the different weapons in the game. Yet, it is easy to like them diamonds.

To end with, a tweet-long conclusion:

The emotional design of a game can be analysed through identifying its events, agents, and objects. Gameplay emotions are +/- reactions towards them.

If you are interested in this kind of reading and analysis method, please check out my article 'Understanding Video Games as Emotional Experiences' in Video Game Theory Reader 2.

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