Hurt: the emotion

In the emotion wheel, hurt is in the category of mad, which implies that hurt is a negative feeling. Hurt is a combination of anger and sadness. It can be triggered in various ways, for example, when the players don’t get something expected back from people they attach great importance to. So for this week, our games focused on creating an emotionally connected target for the players, and then breaking the connections, to try to evoke hurt within players.

Joseph’s game, Heartful Guardian, is a top-down view shooting game. The player defends the heart base in the center with some AI allies. Enemies continuously spawn on the 4 sides of the map and attack the base. The twist happens when allies have taken too much damage — once working side by side with the player, they now turn into enemies and become opponents to defend against. Players now have to destroy their ex-allies in order to save the heart base. The game aims to use betrayal of allies, and enforce player to kill them to evoke hurt.

Melody’s game, A Life Ahead of Us, contains a love story between the male character, whom the player plays as, and the female character.  The affection between the player and the female character grows through the act of gifting. However, at the scene of the wedding, the female character — despite all effort by the male character — chooses Death instead of a marriage with the male character. The game wants to test if players will feel hurt because their effort towards the female character is slighted in favor of Death.

Mac’s game, Buddies, is a puzzle platformer that can be played by either one or two players. Two boxes work together to overcome difficulties and solve puzzles. Their relationship is built and enhanced by these. Yet there comes a moment of betrayal by the other character that causes the death of the player. The hypothesis behind the game is that players will be hurt by break a strong relationship which is built by puzzle solving.

Larry’s game, Tan Dot JR., is an interactive linear experience within the setting of a school. The player starts as a new student who is rejected by many in his attempts to make friends, until he encounters someone who looks like him. While initially agreeable to the friendship, taunts by other classmates causes the player’s new friend to eventually reject him as well. The game tries to bring a light of hope to player then extinguish it to evoke hurt feeling.

Rahul’s game, Come Home, is a cooking simulator. It is based on a very relatable story for a family. The player plays as a mother preparing a meal for a daughter who is coming home to visit after a long time. At the end of the preparation, however, the daughter texts to say that she won’t be visiting after all.The idea was for the player to put in effort with the expectation of spending time with their child and would be fell hurt by their absence later.

Combining our design thoughts and playtest feedback, we learned the following lessons:

Lesson One: A twist is needed to evoke hurt. To achieve hurt, we need to first build up hope and expectations to emotionally connect the player with another character within the game. The twist will then subvert their expectations and cause hurt to the player. For example, in Come Home, the daughter makes a promise, which leads the player to expect the daughter to carry it out. The attachment to the daughter is built through the act of preparing the meal, which allows the twist — the daughter failing to carry out her promise — to cause hurt.

All of our games make use of this technique. We would like to summarize the model like the following figure.

Lesson Two: One of the ways to build a connection is through the act of giving gifts. People always expect more from people or things they care about. Therefore, the relationship between a virtual character/event and the player needs to be built. Gifts are very effective and powerful in solving this problem. Giving gifts to someone without expecting something in return says something about the attachment one has towards the recipient.

In A Life Ahead of Us, the player picks lights and flowers and gives them to the girl. Even though gifting is an action required for the game to go on at the start, we observed that players naturally took to it, so much that they went beyond what was necessary to pile the girl with as many flowers as possible — an optional act. This is in line with cognitive dissonance theory, which states that individuals seek consistency between their attitudes and behaviors. In this case, the act of gifting causes players to believe that they are attached to the girl. This quickly builds up the affection from the player towards the girl.

Lesson Three: Effort sets up expectations. Effort plays an important role by setting up expectations. When the player puts in a lot of effort on the gameplay, their expectations of a good result are accumulated. This creates a great opportunity for designers to break expectations and bring hurt. In Buddies, two boxes cooperate to solve a lot of puzzles to continue the adventure. Both the intelligent  and physical effort in this progress sets up the expectation of a positive ending for the players. During the playtest, when players solve the puzzle and get through the level, they appear satisfied and happy toward the next level.

Lesson Four: Betrayal is a powerful way to evoke hurt. When one character betrays another one, the relationship that has been built up to that point is dissolved in a stronger way than simply disconnecting from the character. Moreover, betrayal is likely to cause hostility in the relationship. In Heartful Guardian, when your allies betray you, they instantly become your enemy. Not only is the moment itself hurtful, the player needs to kill his previous allies by himself as well. During the playtest, we found that players tended to hesitate initially when faced with the prospect of shooting their ex-allies.

Lesson Five: Asking for something is a way to build expectations, which can then be crushed upon rejection. To be rejected, the player always needs to ask for something first. It puts the player into a lower status in the game. Once the player lowers his status and gives part of the power to the game, failure to fulfill the expectation will be hurtful instead of making the player mad. This asking-rejection mechanic is an effective way to evoke hurt in the game. In Tan-Dot JR, the gameplay mechanics constrains the player could just talk to others and ask for friendship. It puts the player in the low status first, then the bullying atmosphere and peer pressure bring strong hurt to the player.

Lesson Six: There must be a promise, which can be implicit, that the other character makes in order for the player to have expectations of the character’s behavior. In Buddies, the promise is set up by having two characters depend on each other to progress through the level: the player expects the other character to fulfil their responsibilities, just as they are doing. In contrast, in A Life Ahead, the player does all the giving; the girl does not promise anything in return. Even though this builds up the emotional connection between the player and the girl, playtesters told us that they did not blame the girl for choosing Death as the girl was not an active participant in the relationship. We learned that in order for players to feel hurt, they must view the other party as having some agency.

Lesson Seven: When the system presents overwhelming odds against the player, the player will lose all expectations, causing them not to feel hurt. Overwhelming odds against the player causes the player to give up their expectations as they see no hope in overcoming the odds. In that case, the feeling of hopelessness will be the dominant emotion instead of hurt. In A Life Ahead of Us, the system pushes the girl to the death even when the player puts all his effort to save her. We saw players frantically trying to shower the girl with lights in order to stop the girl from walking towards Death. However, as they saw the decreasing effectiveness of their efforts, they lost hope and became less frantic. The playtest results corresponded with our observation – players reported that they felt depressed, which is an emotion that is associated with hopelessness.

Final word

Hurt is a negative emotion evoked by expectations being not fulfilled and relationship being broken. Twist is a very fundamental technique to achieve this. Designers can build up various specific experience evoking hurt based on the twist model.