How To Design Games That Evoke Emotions

I am a game designer specializing in designing emotional games as tools to tackle and express specific emotions and mental health issues. For me, it means that I get to design the tools I wish I had when I was a kid and make playing games part of selfcare.

I was eight years old when my father got diagnosed with bipolar disorder and having a bipolar parent has had a huge impact on my life. For many years, I felt very ashamed and sad. I had low self-esteem and suffered from PTSD, depression and anxiety. Looking back now, I understand that I had no tools to process and understand what was going on around me and how deeply someone else’s health issues had an impact on me.

I got into gaming as a kid when my parents were very busy with my dad’s health. I loved playing games like Pokémon, Kirby — or anything on Nintendo 64 really. I felt like playing relieved some of my packed up anxiety. Later, when I started to understand the positive impact games had on my own mental health, I got an idea. What if I could channel my personal experiences into a game of my own to help others in similar situations?

In 2018 I released a game called Hey, Dad: A brief story of mental illness. The response was overwhelmingly positive and I knew that I was on the verge of something important and impactful. If you ask me, focusing on emotions and different societal topics will help move the game industry forward.

I am happy to have found my way to a company that shares my thinking. I got to know about Wondershop thanks to my best friend. He found out that a new game studio with an impact mission was looking for a game designer and thought it sounded like it was made for me. I applied, got in and have been very happy since.

Playing To Feel

As an emotional game designer, my own past experiences serve as my working tools. I create games with simple mechanics and powerful narrative design about topics that you don’t see in traditional commercial games; bipolar disorder, consent, intimacy, empathy, togetherness or even periods. We play one way or another all the time in our lives, so why not use playing mechanics to get to know our emotions? Why not use the power that games can have to get to know more about our feelings and mental health and that way, reduce the stigma?

I design systems and mechanics depending on the emotion I want to evoke in the player. The focus is always first on portraying the emotion and after that on the mechanics, as a contrast to the traditional game design. Creating the right kind of atmosphere in the game is crucial in order to evoke emotional responses in players. I try to work with different elements, such as illumination, music and placing of objects to create such an atmosphere for our games. For a player, an emotional game offers a platform to explore feelings. I believe that understanding our emotions is the first step to understanding and respecting ourselves as a person.

Leaf — An Emotional Game Prototype

At Wondershop, I am currently working on designing a special emotional game prototype. The project, Leaf, is at heart a project to be integrated in our flagship community game, Wonderworld, but there are possibilities to launch it as a stand-alone, too. The goal with Leaf is to get children to know their range of emotions and to help them understand and connect with them.

In Leaf, different emotions will be displayed and they’ll have their own emotional minigame. We try to find mechanics to wake the player’s emotional responses, their feelings, to each emotion. With anger for example, the goal is not to make the player more angry, but to help the player in being comfortable with feeling angry. The game aims to normalize that feeling and to help the player release anger in a positive way. Feeling angry is a part of our range of emotions and a normal emotion to feel. It sounds very easy, but it’s actually quite challenging in today’s world to be something else than just sad or happy. Our society easily portrays happiness as the ultimate goal, which might result in feeling like there is something wrong with not feeling happy. We hope that Leaf will help players to recognize how they feel, normalize all emotions and give tools to release them in a healthy way.

Part Of A Bigger Vision

At Wondershop, we aim to serve as large an audience as possible, making impact through the positive experiences games create. Emotional game prototypes like Leaf are some of the examples of our iterative approach in our design-for-impact-philosophy.

Both Leaf and Wondershop’s flagship game Wonderworld are games with clear impact targets. The principles in both are the same but the perspectives are different. Where Wonderworld focuses on how to gamify existing impactful activity in a physical space, Leaf is a prototype of how the gaming experience on its own can be impactful.

With Leaf we are experimenting already with the third phase of our vision of how games can have a positive impact on the players. In the first phase games serve as an impact measuring and supportive tool for communities’ own activities, helping to know what makes the activity impactful. In the second phase we imagine developing and giving a clear digital form to these impactful activities. In the third phase, we dream of reaching a level where just playing our games will have a positive effect on the player. With the likes of Leaf, we want to prove game-time beneficial and positive.

We believe strongly in communities and playing together. However, thinking about the accessibility, we want to keep in mind those players without an everyday access to a physical game hub. We think that the prototypes and the flagship game are not mutually exclusive, but actually add extra value to each other.

About The Designer On A Mission

When it comes to my professional mission, I’m trying to remind myself about our team’s mantra on how we should feel accomplished even if only one kid benefits from our games. By sharing my designs and my story, I want to show to people like me that they are not alone nor the only ones going through the difficult things.

Designing impactful games is my way of providing people better tools to get to know their range of emotions and to help them to deal with stuff that can numb both heart and head. If that way I can eventually encourage someone to take better care of their mental wellbeing, I consider it a mission accomplished.

Like what you read? Check out our previous posts:

Building Games With Impact: How to Push the Boundaries
of Digital and Physical
by Essi Jukkala, Lead Game Developer at Wondershop

Designing a Community Driven Game
by Antti Lax, Lead Game Designer at Wondershop

How I Got to Reimagining Games for Societal Good
by Samu Hautala, Head of Engineering at Wondershop

Step into the world of Wonder: envisioning an impact-driven game studio
by Annastiina Salminen, CEO at Wondershop