Emotional matters. Delineating the industry professional's view on emotion in video games.

For the past 10 years, lack of emotion in video games has been a staple topic of discussion among game developers, despite the fact that numerous studies have shown that video games are capable of awakening a vast array of emotions in their players. The purpose of this study is to see what exactly is discussed when the topic is brought up and to delineate how this discussion is connected to the potential of the video game medium. I will be using a method called affinity diagram to analyse two sets of data: interview data on future trends industry professionals are following, and a selection of articles gathered from Gamasutra.com. The interview data is used for placing the emotion discussion on the map of contemporary industry trends, whereas the data gathered from Gamasutra gives us a more in-depth look into the topics and themes that industry professionals bring up when talking about emotion. The data shows that not only is emotion considered an important element in all games, but the discussion is moving away from the very high-level ”there should be more emotion” -type to the more solution-focused ”how to bring in more emotion” -type. It also shows that games are believed to have notable potential, and that emotion is seen as being closely tied to reaching this potential. Asiasanat:video games, emotion, emotion discussion, game studies, game design research, affinity diagra