Emotions, Technology, and Digital Games

Emotions, Technology, and Digital Games explores the need for people to experience enjoyment, excitement, anxiety, anger, frustration, and many other emotions. The book provides essential information on why it is necessary to have a greater understanding of the power these emotions have on players, and how they affect players during, and after, a game.

This book takes this understanding and shows how it can be used in practical ways, including the design of video games for teaching and learning, creating tools to measure social and emotional development of children, determining how empathy-related thought processes affect ethical decision-making, and examining how the fictional world of game play can influence and shape real-life experiences.

• Details how games affect emotions―both during and after play
• Describes how we can manage a player’s affective reactions
• Applies the emotional affect to making games more immersive
• Examines game-based learning and education
• Identifies which components of online games support socio-emotional development
• Discusses the impact of game-based emotions beyond the context of games

Sharon Tettegah is a Professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Former Program Chair of Digital Environments for Learning, Teaching and Agency in the College of Education, at the University of Illinois, at Urbana Champaign. She has an appointment in the Cognitive Neuroscience in Bio-Intelligence at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. In addition, she is a Research Scientist and affiliate at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Her research centers on the intersection of STEM learning, Emotions, Equity and Social justice. She was also a Program Director in 2010-2012 at the National Science Foundation where she managed five programs in the Directorates of Education and Human Resources, Computer and Information Science and Engineering and including a NSF cross-cutting program on Science, Engineering, Education for Sustainability (SEES). She is also the Series Editor for Emotions and Technology with Elsevier, Academic Psychology Division.

Dr. Wenhao David Huang is an Associate Professor at Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are mainly focused on designing and validating technology-enabled learning engagement systems and environments across subject matter areas in organizations. Dr. Huang is particularly interested in better designing game-based learning and performance solutions for various groups of adult learners across learning and performance contexts, in order to sustain learners’ interests and efforts in engaging with intended affective, cognitive, and behavioral learning processes. Dr. Huang’s work on game-based learning articulates the relationships between learners’ motivational and cognitive processing, various design-relevant attributes for efficient game-based learning environments, learners’ dilemma when interacting with game-based learning environments where distractions are abundant, and considering game-based learning system as an integral part of the organizational learning and performance solution.