"You design games for how they make you feel: Literacies, gaming and affect"
During a research study with videogame designers and teenagers in a Canadian high school, a game designer shared with a student and avid gamer: "you make games for how they make you feel." The phrase stuck with me throughout the six-week research study and beyond as I worked more intensively with affect theory, gaming, and literacy research (Rowsell, 2020). In this talk, I will explore data from two game-based research studies with an affect lens (Ehret & Rowsell, In Process; Leander & Boldt, 2013) to excavate the ways that young people embed their experiences and emotions into game-based design work. Gaming cultures have attracted much attention for fostering thinking and problem-solving (Abrams, 2017; Gee 2003; Salen and Zimmerman 2004; Squire 2008, 2012; Steinkuehler, 2011), for forging affinity and community spaces (Gee and Hayes 2011; Curwood et al, 2013), for inspiring interest and engagement for teenagers (Erstad, 2015), and as pedagogical platforms for teachers (Arnseth, Hanghoj, Duus Henriksen, & Misfeldt, 2018). However, less attention has been paid to the ways that people experience games in an embodied, sensory, and affective way. Drawing on recent literacy research that orients analyses around affect (Leander & Ehret, 2019) and embodiment (Enriquez et al, 2016), I will excavate data for affective experiencing of designs and felt materialities as an alternative way of viewing game-based research.
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