ELLIE CHRYSIKOPOULOS
elckgames
‘How does an escapist and exploration mindset affect the players’ experience in single-player open-world adventure games?’
Abstract
Our brains are one of our bodies' most complex and stimulated muscles. They are constantly running billions of processes and allowing us to experience a multitude of emotions and activities. Emotions provide an integral piece in assessing how we experience—people, life, games, and moments that intertwine to create our memories and associations. In simpler terms, emotions guide our everyday lives and shape us into who we will become. Current literature unpacks emotions felt during gameplay, player typology, psychology, motivation, and player focus during gameplay, excluding how emotions and state of mind impact a personal experience. This dissertation will research ‘How does an escapist and exploration mindset affect the players’ experience in single-player open-world adventure games?’ This exploration will be conducted through a series of interviews about Zelda and Elden Ring with experienced Gamers. The results of this study concluded that aspects of escapism and exploration are prevalent in all gaming experiences and suggest they cannot be separated.
Introduction
Single-player games simulate and maintain one of the most important perspectives in life—your own. They allow the player to focus on their respective avatars and emotions to the same extent they would focus on mirroring aspects of themselves. Flow is a key factor in creating immersion during gameplay, contributing to the player experience. Presented by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life, flow is often used when speaking about a player’s experience. It describes a state of mind and intrinsic motivation allowing the player to directly connect with the game and its features. The reason why players feel completely in-tune with the game and all other thoughts—about themselves, surroundings, and current events—fade is due to ‘the total demand on psychic energy,’ needed to reach flow, as ‘a person in flow is completely focused’(Csikszentmihalyi, 1998, pg. 39) on the task at hand. Intrinsic motivation is doing something purely because you want to. Any task with an external reward—ie. trophies, money, and validation—are extrinsic motivations. Csikszentmihalyi was able to label feelings in correlation to various combinations of skill and challenges that players face [Appendix, Figure 1].
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