Dissecting Play – Investigating the Cognitive and Emotional Motivations and Affects of Computer Gameplay

All games are cognitive learning environments. A cognitive approach to understanding games and gameplay emphasises the analysis and understanding of these learning functions and how game design features facilitate them. The experience of gameplay is one of interacting with a game design in the performance of cognitive tasks, with a variety of emotions arising from or associated with different elements of motivation, task performance and completion. Psychophysiological techniques provide empirical methods for investigating play that provide a foundation for developing plausible models of what those cognitive decision processes are, how they relate to design features and how emotions integrated with task performance lead to rewards of play, creating an experience of 'fun'.Published in CGAMES08, Wolverhampton, UK, 3-5 November 2008