Thinking and Doing: Challenge, Agency, and the Eudaimonic Experience in Video Games

The nascent growth of videogames has led to great leaps in technical understanding in how to create a functional and entertaining play experience. However, the complex, mixed-affect, eudaimonic entertainment experience that is possible when playing a video game—how it is formed, how it is experienced and how to design for it, has been investigated far less than hedonistic emotional experiences focusing on fun, challenge and ‘enjoyment.’ Participants volunteered to be interviewed about their mixed-affect emotional experiences of playing avant-garde videogames. New conceptions of agency emerged (Actual, Interpretive, Fictional, Mechanical) from the analysis of transcripts and were used to produce a framework of four categories of agency. This new framework offers designers and researchers the extra nuance in conversations around agency, and contributes to the discussion of how we can design video games that allow for complex, reflective, eudaimonic emotional experiences

Inkle and Yarico; an opera, in three acts;

Founded on no. 11 of the Spectator.Mode of access: Internet

Explaining self-harm:youth cybertalk and marginalised sexualities and genders

This study investigates self-harm among young lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) people. Using qualitative virtual methods, we examined online forums to explore young LGBT people’s cybertalk about emotional distress and self-harming. We investigated how youth explained the relationship between self-harm and sexuality and gender. We found that LGBT youth may articulate contradictory, ambiguous, and multiple accounts of the relationship but there were three strong explanations: (a) self-harm was because of homophobia and transphobia; (b) self-harm was due to self-hatred, fear, and shame; (c) self-harm was emphatically not related to sexuality or gender. There was evidence of youth negotiating LGBT identities, managing homophobia, resisting pathologization, and explaining self-harm as a way of coping