Carman Ng

This presentation illustrates mixed-method empirical analyses of trauma-themed independent games, to support theorizing dynamics among embodiment, multimodality, and meaning-making in designing digital games for mental health. Multimodality explores how communication involves combining various expressive resources effectively, such as visuals, language, sound, music, and haptics. In digital gameplay, meaning traverses technical materiality, bodies, and worlds (Keogh 2018). This emphasizes how the body crucially constitutes the mind, meaning, and communication, as substantially explored in embodied cognition (Gallagher 2015); and the importance to expand approaches in the humanities to examine affects in media encounters (Genosko 2016). In this presentation, I discuss findings from an ongoing research on games that engage such phenomena as loss, grief, war, and mental illness, with the illustrative case of Nevermind (Flying Mollusk 2016) – a psychological thriller featuring motifs of psychological trauma and biofeedback sensitivity to foster player mindfulness and mood management. Motivating my research is the aim to explore how digital games can constructively engage with mental health by cohering gameplay mechanics, narrative motifs, multimodal aesthetics, and forms of interpretive and affective difficulty (Jagoda 2018). Analyses combine player experiments (with affect-sensing equipment) and corpus-based game analyses, to triangulate embodied data and fine-grained multimodal patterns. Latest endeavors in multimodality research emphasize interdisciplinary, empirical work and intrinsic contributions of embodied responses to meaning (Bateman 2019; Bateman, Wildfeuer, and Hiippala 2017). In this regard, my analyses correlate multimodal patterns and players’ affective responses at significant gameplay moments, in relation to higher-order design strategies. Specifically, discussion details how Nevermind, and selected games from my corpora, experiment with player agency, witnessing and complicity, as well as ludonarrative dissonance; while eliciting diverse, complex effects, such as calm, relief, alienation, unease, and anxiety. Guiding this presentation is the aim to motivate game designs and research that explore mental health and resilience beyond gamification.

Panel 3 - Effects