But some of the most meaningful games do something quieter. They interrupt that power. They place something fragile in our hands and ask us not to conquer, but to care. A wounded creature that does not always obey. A frightened child watching what we become. A tired horse that needs brushing after a long ride. A spirit waiting for one last meal before saying goodbye. A damaged forest slowly breathing again after the machines are gone.

Care in games rarely begins with a cutscene. It begins with an action repeated often enough to become a relationship: feeding, carrying, waiting, repairing, listening, returning, letting go.

The game does not simply tell us that something matters. It asks us to practice mattering to something else. And that may be one of the most powerful forms of meaningful play.

Because care begins when the player’s power is interrupted by responsibility.

Care is not a feeling first

We often talk about care as if it were an emotion. As if the designer’s task were simply to make players feel attached to a companion, a child, a pet, a community, or a world. Give them a sad backstory, make them cute, put them in danger, add soft music or let the player save them. And sometimes that works, but games have a deeper tool than representation, they have interaction.

In games, care is not only something we feel, it is something we perform: we feed, we heal, we protect, we wait, we carry, we comfort, we clean, we repair and return. And through repetition, the system teaches the body what the story wants the heart to understand.

On paper, these actions can look minor and even inefficient. They do not always advance the plot or create mastery, they might not even reward the player with something spectacular. But they do something else, they create rhythm, and rhythm is one of the ways affection becomes embodied. A single act of care may feel like a task. Repeated care begins to feel like a bond.

Maintenance can become intimacy

Red Dead Redemption 2 understands this beautifully. Arthur’s horse could have been just transportation, but the game slows the relationship down.

You brush your horse, feed it, calm it, lead it by hand, revive it when it falls, whistle and wait for it to return. Over time, its trust grows and it starts to respond differently. It becomes less like a vehicle and more like a companion with a body, a temperament, and a history of shared travel.

The bond does not come from a single dramatic scene. It comes from use, return, dependency, and maintenance. At first, brushing the horse is just a mechanic, but later it becomes a habit. Then, almost without noticing, it becomes care. This is the strange emotional power of maintenance.

In design, maintenance is often treated as friction: the thing between the player and the “real” experience. But maintenance can become intimate when it stops feeling like upkeep and starts feeling like recognition: the horse is muddy because you rode through a storm, it is tired because you pushed too hard, it needs calming because danger frightened it or it is there because you called.

The system remembers the relationship through the body. This is why care mechanics need more than meters: a meter can measure attachment, but it cannot create it alone. If care becomes only a number to optimize, the relationship collapses back into utility: feed the horse to increase bond level, brush the horse to maintain performance or protect the horse because it is expensive.

That is not quite care yet. Care begins when the player knows the system has a function, but the action starts to exceed that function emotionally: you brush the horse because the horse is dirty, not because the reward is optimal. Because, somehow, it feels wrong not to.

The fragile other

Care needs vulnerability: something must be able to need us. Not necessarily in a helpless way, fragility does not mean weakness, it means exposure. A being, place, or system can be harmed, neglected, misunderstood, exhausted, lost, or changed by what we do.

Without vulnerability, care becomes decorative: the player can admire a character, like them, identify with them, enjoy their dialogue, but responsibility only appears when the relationship has stakes.

This is part of why The Last Guardian is so emotionally unusual.

Trico is enormous. Powerful. Sometimes terrifying. This is not a fragile creature in the obvious sense, and yet, emotionally, Trico is one of the most vulnerable companions in games: he is wounded, afraid, distrustful, distracted, hungry, confused, he does not fully understand what the player wants, he does not always obey. And that is exactly why the relationship works.

If Trico responded instantly to every command, he would be a tool. A beautiful tool, maybe, a cinematic tool, but still a tool. Instead, he hesitates, misunderstands, refuses, looks away, gets scared, needs reassurance. You cannot simply operate him, you have to relate to him.

The frustration is not separate from the care, it might be part of it. Because care is easy when the fragile thing is cute, grateful, and efficient. It becomes meaningful when it is inconvenient. That inconvenience creates a subtle emotional shift. The player is still acting, still solving, still progressing, but mastery is no longer enough. You cannot dominate Trico into trust, you have to become patient enough for trust to form: his hesitation is the relationship, his resistance is what separates him from a machine and his vulnerability is what turns command into care.

Care is not control

Jaime Banks and Nicholas Bowman describe player-avatar relationships through dimensions such as intimacy and agency. At one end, the avatar can be experienced as an object: something controlled, instrumental, useful. At another, it can be experienced more like an “other”: a being with perceived agency, separateness, and emotional significance. That distinction matters for care, because care requires a strange balance. The player needs enough agency to respond, but not so much control that the cared-for being becomes an extension of the player’s will.

A perfectly obedient companion rarely feels alive for long. It may be satisfying, useful or support competence, but intimacy often requires separateness. To care for something, I must be able to perceive it as not entirely me.

This also appears in work on character attachment. Lewis, Weber, and Bowman describe attachment to game characters through dimensions such as identification, suspension of disbelief, control, and responsibility for the character’s needs. Later work by Bowman and colleagues suggests an important distinction: enjoyable game experiences are often associated with a strong sense of control, while meaningful game experiences are more associated with responsibility.

Those are not opposites. Games can give us both, but they create different emotional textures:

Control is clean, while care is relational.

Control reduces friction, while care sometimes requires it.

Control asks the world to respond to me, care asks me to respond to the world.

This is why the most emotionally powerful companions are rarely just efficient helpers. They have needs, limits, moods, fears, memories, or forms of resistance. They do not exist only to amplify the player. They interrupt the player’s momentum with their own presence. They make the player adjust.

And adjustment is one of the quiet languages of care.

When protection becomes identity

The Walking Dead does something slightly different with Clementine.

Clementine is not a pet, a mount, or a system. She is a child and a moral presence. At first, protecting her feels obvious. She is young, frightened, and alone in a collapsing world. But over time, the relationship deepens into something more complex. The question is no longer only whether Lee can keep Clementine alive, it is what kind of person he becomes in front of her. The player’s choices are not private. They are observed. That changes the moral atmosphere of play.

Violence is no longer only survival, it becomes example. Mercy is no longer only kindness, it becomes teaching. Lying, stealing, killing, abandoning, forgiving, risking, all of these actions begin to carry a second meaning because Clementine is there. Not because she judges the player through a morality meter, but because her presence makes the player aware of themselves as someone being watched, trusted, and learned from.

Because care is never only about the vulnerable being. It is also about the caretaker. It reveals our patience, our fear, our selfishness, our tenderness, our need for control. It shows us where our values hold and where they begin to bend under pressure.

In that sense, care belongs very naturally beside morality. A moral choice asks what we believe. A care relationship asks what we can sustain.

Care as emotional regulation

Care is often imagined as soft. But in play, care can be difficult, sometimes even uncomfortable, because it asks for emotional regulation, patience, persistence or restraint. The ability to stay responsive when the thing we care for frustrates us, slows us down, or cannot give us the outcome we want.

This is why care is not the same as affection: affection can be immediate, care has duration.

Affection is: I feel something for you.
Care is: I will keep responding to your needs, even when it costs me effort.

Games because games are usually built around efficient action. The player learns to remove obstacles, optimize routes, reduce friction, improve performance, but care often interrupts that logic.

• The Last Guardian is about tolerating misunderstanding.

• Death Stranding is about carrying weight carefully across difficult terrain.

• Spiritfarer is about preparing meals, building rooms, listening to requests, and accompany spirits toward death.

• Red Dead Redemption 2 is about slowing down enough to tend to an animal body that has carried us across the world.

These actions can look small, but psychologically they ask a lot. They ask the player not only to act, but to regulate the impulse to rush. That is why care can feel so different from achievement: Achievement often moves toward completion, care moves toward continuity. It is not always about solving, sometimes it is about staying.

Research on emotional intelligence and resilience often connects emotional regulation with persistence: the ability to adapt, endure difficulty, and continue moving toward meaningful goals. In games, care can create a similar emotional demand on a smaller, fictional scale. Not because the game is training us like a workplace intervention, but because the structure is familiar: something matters, something resists, and we have to keep responding.

Care becomes meaningful when it asks more from us than intention, it asks for follow-through.

Carrying as care

Death Stranding makes this almost literal. So much of the game is about carrying: cargo, supplies, bodies, memoriesm,other people’s hopes or a baby in a pod pressed against your chest.

Movement itself becomes an act of responsibility. In many games, traversal is freedom: you run, climb, glide, fast travel. The world is a surface for motion. But in Death Stranding, movement is burdened: you lean under weight, you lose balance, you scan terrain, you place ladders, you soothe BB, you feel the distance because the distance pushes back. The game makes care physical.

To carry something is to become aware of its fragility. You cannot move as if only your own body matters. Every slope, river, rock, and fall becomes relational because something entrusted to you can be damaged. That is a powerful design shift. The player’s body is no longer just a vehicle for agency, it becomes a medium of protection. And when other players’ structures appear in the world: a bridge, a ladder, a rope, a generator; care expands beyond direct companionship. You feel the trace of someone else’s effort. Someone made passage easier. Someone reduced your burden. Someone you may never meet helped you continue. Care becomes infrastructural, not heroic, just a world made more livable by small acts left behind.

That kind of care is easy to underestimate because it does not always look dramatic. But emotionally, it matters. It turns connection into logistics. It makes generosity spatial. The world becomes a place where other people’s care has shape.

Empathy is not enough

It is tempting to say that care begins with empathy and sometimes it does. Empathy allows us to feel with another being, or at least understand something of their internal state. It lets a character’s fear, sadness, pain, or need become emotionally legible. But empathy and care are not the same.

Empathy is a response. Care is a commitment enacted over time.

Empathy: I understand what you feel.
Compassion: I am moved by your suffering.
Care: I will do something about it, and not just once.

Research on empathy and violent games suggests that empathic framing can change how players interpret characters and actions, but the effects depend heavily on context: who the player controls, whether violence feels justified, and whether the player sees a character as victim, villain, or agent.

Empathy can soften aggression, but it can also intensify anger when it frames revenge as deserved. Feeling with someone does not automatically lead to care. Sometimes it leads to punishment. Sometimes to justification. Sometimes to moral certainty.

So the designer’s question cannot simply be: “How do we make the player empathize?” It has to be: “What kind of action does this feeling invite?”

That is where care becomes design. A game can make us feel someone’s pain and still give us only violence as a response. It can make us understand a character’s suffering and then reward domination. It can ask us to protect someone while mechanically treating them as cargo, currency, or leverage.

Care requires alignment between feeling and action. If the game wants tenderness, it must give tenderness a form. If it wants responsibility, it must let responsibility be practiced. If it wants the player to protect what is fragile, fragility must be more than a narrative label, it must be something the system allows the player to notice, respond to, and live with.

The care loop

Care in games often follows a quiet loop.

First, the player notices vulnerability: a creature limps, a child looks afraid, a horse breathes heavily, a forest turns grey, a package begins to break, a companion falls silent.

Then the player responds: they heal, feed, carry, comfort, clean, protect, repair, wait, or return.

Then the world answers: trust grows, the creature relaxes, the child remembers, the horse leans into the touch, the biome recovers, the cargo arrives intact, the relationship changes.

Then the action repeats.

And through repetition, task becomes ritual. Ritual becomes attachment. Attachment becomes responsibility. Responsibility becomes reflection.

This is the care loop: Notice > Respond > Receive > Repeat > Attach > Reflect

Not every game needs all of these stages. But when they align, care becomes more than a quest objective, it becomes a relationship between attention and consequence. The important part is not simply that the player performs a caring action. It is that the action returns with enough variation, feedback, and emotional context to gather meaning. A single “press X to comfort” prompt can work in the right moment, but a relationship cannot be built entirely from isolated prompts. It needs return. Because care is cumulative. It grows through the memory of having shown up before.

Care beyond companions

Care does not only belong to characters. Games can make us care for places as well. This is where ecological care becomes especially interesting.

Many games treat nature as inventory: trees become wood, animals become materials, plants become ingredients, land becomes traversal space, the world exists to be extracted, optimized, upgraded, consumed. There is nothing inherently wrong with resource systems. They can be satisfying, elegant, and meaningful. But they also teach a particular relationship to the world: the environment matters because of what it provides.

Care asks for another relationship. The world matters because it can be harmed and because it can respond.

In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora one of the most meaningful possibilities in that world is the shift from extraction to restoration. RDA sites scar the landscape. Pollution does not exist only as a mission blocker; it appears as injury. And when those places are liberated, the surrounding biome can recover.

That recovery matters because it makes care visible. A damaged ecosystem slowly returning to life is more than environmental feedback, it is a form of answer. The world is not just rewarding the player, it is breathing again. That changes the emotional meaning of action. Destruction is no longer only combat success. Restoration is no longer only completion. The land itself becomes a vulnerable presence, something capable of being wounded and, with effort, partially healed.

Ecological care begins when the world stops being a container for resources and starts behaving like a living body. A polluted area is not just an obstacle, it is an injury. A recovering forest is not just visual progression, it is reciprocity. And reciprocity is central to resonance. We feel touched by the world, act upon it, and then sense that the world has answered back.

That answer is what makes care feel alive.

When care means letting go

But care is not always restoration. Sometimes care cannot save. Sometimes it can only accompany.

Spiritfarer understands this with painful clarity. On the surface, so much of the game is gentle: you build rooms, cook meals, gather materials, hug spirits, learn their preferences, fulfill requests, make things warmer, softer, more comfortable.

The structure is full of care rituals, but the purpose of care is not to keep everyone with you, it is to help them leave. That is what makes the game so quietly devastating. It takes mechanics that could have been cozy and gives them an existential direction. The meal matters because it may be one of the last. The room matters because it gives someone a place to be themselves before they go. The hug matters because care does not prevent loss, but it can change how loss is held.

This is a more mature form of care than protection.

Protection: I will stop harm from reaching you.
Restoration: I will help you heal.
Accompaniment: I will stay with you through what cannot be fixed.

Games often struggle with this because they are so deeply built around agency. They want to give the player problems to solve, systems to master, endings to unlock, but some experiences become meaningful precisely because they resist solution.

Death cannot be optimized away. Grief cannot be completed. A goodbye cannot be won. Spiritfarer does not remove agency. It redirects it. You cannot save the spirits from leaving. The game understands something many systems avoid: care is not proven by keeping someone with us forever. Sometimes care is proven by helping them leave. That is eudaimonic design at its strongest. Not fun in the simple sense. Not pleasure as ease. But meaning through tenderness, responsibility, and acceptance.

The danger of instrumental care

There is a design risk here. Care systems can easily become optimization systems wearing emotional clothing. Feed the companion to increase loyalty. Give gifts to unlock romance. Pet the animal to gain a bonus. Restore the biome to clear the map. Keep the child safe to get the good ending.

Again, rewards are not the problem, the problem begins when care is reduced entirely to exchange. When the player no longer asks, “What does this being need?” but only, “What do I get?” At that point, care becomes management. Sometimes that is appropriate. Many games are about management. But if the emotional goal is genuine attachment, the system has to leave room for care that exceeds utility.

One way to do this is through asymmetry. The cared-for being should not always repay the player efficiently. The horse may simply calm down. The child may simply trust you. The spirit may tell a story. The ecosystem may become beautiful again. The companion may lean into your hand.

These are not useless rewards, they are relational rewards. They matter because they acknowledge the act without fully converting it into currency.

Care needs feedback, but not all feedback should become profit. Sometimes the reward is not power. Sometimes it is relief, warmth or trust.

The sense that something fragile is a little less alone because you were there.

Designing conditions for care

If care is not just a feeling but a practice, then designing for care means designing the conditions under which responsibility can become emotionally meaningful. Not every game needs this, not every companion should be fragile, and not every world should ask for tenderness, but when care is part of the intended experience, several principles matter.

First, vulnerability has to be legible. Players need to perceive need, not only through UI, but through animation, sound, behavior, pacing, environment, and consequence. A number going down can communicate urgency, but a creature flinching, a child withdrawing, a horse stumbling, or a forest losing color can communicate meaning.

Second, care needs action. Feeling bad for a character is not yet care. The player needs a way to respond. The action can be small, but it should be concrete: feed, hold, repair, carry, wait, choose words carefully, make space. Return later.

Third, the cared-for being needs some otherness. If it behaves only as an extension of the player, it becomes equipment. Care grows when the player senses another rhythm, another need, another presence that cannot be fully absorbed into their own agency.

Fourth, care needs time. Instant attachment is possible, but sustained care usually grows through repetition. The player has to come back. Notice changes. Build familiarity. Remember previous actions. Feel the relationship accumulate.

Fifth, care should change something. Not always dramatically. Not always permanently, but enough for the player to feel that their attention mattered. Trust grows. A room becomes inhabited. A landscape recovers. A companion behaves differently. A goodbye becomes possible.

And finally, care should not be too clean. Real care includes frustration, uncertainty, compromise, and loss. A care system that is only pleasant may become shallow. Meaning often appears when the player must regulate impatience, accept limits, or continue caring without perfect control. That does not mean designers should make care annoying. It means care should be allowed to have weight.

Why care matters

Care is one of the most human forms of play because it changes the direction of attention.

• Instead of asking the player to dominate a system, it asks them to notice dependence.

• Instead of rewarding only speed, strength, or efficiency, it can reward patience, gentleness, consistency, and presence.

• Instead of making the world feel like something to consume, it can make the world feel like something that responds.

This is why care connects so deeply to meaningful gameplay.

• It supports relatedness because the player feels connected to another being or world.

• It supports morality because the player experiences responsibility.

• It supports identity rehearsal because the player discovers what kind of caretaker they become under pressure.

• It supports reflection because care lingers. We remember the beings we protected, the ones we failed, the ones we had to release.

• And it supports eudaimonia because care is not always pleasurable in the simple sense. Sometimes it is slow. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it asks us to stay present with vulnerability we cannot fix. But it feels meaningful because it touches something real.

To care is to let something matter enough to interrupt us. That interruption is powerful. A game creates care when it gives the player enough agency to help, but enough vulnerability to make helping matter. But because somewhere through the repetition of small gestures, the player begins to feel responsible. And responsibility, when freely chosen, is one of the deepest forms of connection games can create.

Meaningful care in games is not about making players love what is useful, it is about letting them protect what is fragile.

References

Banks, J. (2013). Human-technology relationality and self-network organization: Players and avatars in World of Warcraft. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Colorado State University.

Banks, J., & Bowman, N. D. (2013). Close intimate playthings? Understanding player-avatar relationships as a function of attachment, agency, and intimacy. Selected Papers of Internet Research 14.0.

Bowman, N. D., Rogers, R., Sherrick, B. I., Woolley, J., & Chung, M.-Y. (2013). “In control or in their shoes”: How character attachment differentially influences video game enjoyment and appreciation. Paper presented at the Broadcast Education Association Research Symposium.

Happ, C., & Melzer, A. (2014). Empathy and violent video games. In Emotion in Games.

Lewis, M. L., Weber, R., & Bowman, N. D. (2008). “They may be pixels, but they’re MY pixels”: Developing a metric of character attachment in role-playing video games. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 11(4), 515–518.

Mekler, E. D., Iacovides, I., & Bopp, J. A. (2018). Exploring the role of reflection for the player experience. Proceedings of CHI PLAY.

Magnano, P., Craparo, G., & Paolillo, A. (2016). Resilience and emotional intelligence: Which role in achievement motivation. International Journal of Psychological Research, 9(1), 9–20.

Oliver, M. B., & Raney, A. A. (2011). Entertainment as pleasurable and meaningful: Identifying hedonic and eudaimonic motivations for entertainment consumption. Journal of Communication, 61, 984–1004.

Yannakakis, G. N., & Paiva, A. (2014). Emotion in games. In Emotion in Games.

You’re not lost exactly. But you’re not oriented either. And somehow, that in-between state can feel more alive than certainty. We often talk about exploration as if it were mostly about movement. About openness. About freedom. About giving the player a world big enough to roam.

But the moments that stay with us usually aren’t just about where we went. They’re about what happened inside us while we were there: the slow tightening of attention, the pull of a question, the strange pleasure of sensing that the world knows more than we do.

That feeling has a name. Curiosity.

Not just the desire to see what’s over the next hill, but the desire to make sense of something that refuses to become obvious. The wish to stay with a mystery long enough for it to begin answering back.

Curiosity is not just a mechanic of exploration. It is an emotional architecture of not-yet-knowing, a way games turn confusion into attention, attention into understanding, and understanding into wonder.

And when a game gets that right, exploration stops feeling like content consumption. It starts to feel like a relationship.

The strange pleasure of not knowing

Psychologist George Loewenstein described curiosity as what happens when our attention locks onto a gap in our knowledge, when we suddenly become aware that something is missing, and can almost feel the shape of it.

That sounds tidy on paper. But in experience, it feels much messier. More alive. A knowledge gap doesn’t stay abstract for long. Once we notice it, it starts to tug at us. The mind leans forward. A little tension forms. Not panic. Not even frustration, at least not at first. More like an ache. A cognitive restlessness. Something doesn’t fit yet.

And because it doesn’t fit, we want to keep turning it over. This is why riddles stay in our heads long after we stop trying to solve them. Why certain mysteries become more compelling the moment we catch only part of the pattern. Why “almost understanding” can feel so much more charged than simply being told.

What we want in those moments is not just information. We want coherence. We want the satisfaction of feeling the world become more intelligible beneath our attention.

And games are uniquely good at this because they don’t just present mysteries. They let us move inside them. They let us test ideas, notice patterns, get things wrong, circle back, and slowly build an understanding that feels like it belongs to us.

In most media, discovery is something you witness. In games, discovery can become something you do.

Curiosity has a feeling

We often talk about curiosity as if it were purely cognitive. A mental process. A drive to learn. But curiosity also has a very distinct emotional texture.

Psychology sometimes groups feelings like awe, confusion, and anticipation under the label of epistemic emotions: emotions tied to knowledge, interpretation, and understanding. I’ve always found that framing helpful, because it captures something games do especially well: they make knowing feel emotional.

Awe appears when the world exceeds our mental model, when something feels larger, stranger, or more intricate than we expected.

Confusion enters when the model breaks, when what we thought we understood no longer holds.

Anticipation lives in that almost-there space, when meaning feels close enough to sense, but not yet to hold.

The most memorable games don’t rush to erase those feelings. They work with them. They let us sit, for a little while, inside that fragile, charged state where understanding is still forming. That’s part of why wonder feels so different from spectacle. Spectacle overwhelms us all at once, but wonder unfolds.

It asks something gentler, and maybe more demanding: attention.

When knowledge becomes progress

Few games understand this as beautifully as Outer Wilds.

What makes it so special is not just that it contains mysteries. Plenty of games do. It’s that the game trusts knowledge enough to build almost everything around it. You land on a planet and find a city slowly disappearing under sand. Somewhere else, you pick up fragments of writing from a civilization that is long gone but somehow still present in the shape of everything around you. A strange experiment on one planet echoes something broken on another. A signal leads you somewhere, but only into a deeper question. Again and again, the game gives you pieces that feel partial, charged, unfinished.

Why did these people disappear?

Why is the solar system behaving this way?

Why does everything seem connected, even before you understand how?

The game never really says: here is your task, now go complete it.

It says something quieter: here are fragments. Stay with them.

And slowly, almost without noticing, your motivation changes. You are no longer exploring to unlock the next reward or clear the next objective. You are exploring because you want to understand. Because each piece slightly rearranges the world in your mind, and that rearrangement becomes its own kind of progress.

That’s such a powerful shift. Knowledge itself becomes the progression system.

And because of that, discovery feels unusually intimate. The world is not handing itself over in neat pieces. It is asking you to listen, compare, remember, return. To build a relationship with what you don’t yet know.

That is a very different emotional rhythm from most progression systems. It doesn’t feel like accumulation. It feels like orientation.

When games explain too quickly

This is also why so many games accidentally flatten curiosity while trying to be helpful. A marker appears. Go here. A trail lights up. Follow this. An NPC explains exactly what happened, why it matters, and what your next step should be.

Before a real question has time to form, the answer has already arrived in task form.

Of course, guidance has its place. Not every game wants mystery. Not every player wants to sit in uncertainty for long. Clarity matters. Accessibility matters. Momentum matters. But there is a real cost when explanation comes too early. It interrupts the emotional sequence that curiosity needs.

First, the player notices something they can’t fully explain. Then attention sharpens. Then a question forms. Then exploration becomes self-propelled, not because the game assigned it, but because the player now feels the pull of unresolved meaning.

Over-guidance cuts that sequence in half. It replaces the question with an instruction. And those are not the same thing. A task can keep a player moving. But only a mystery can make them lean forward.

That’s why some enormous open worlds end up feeling so strangely hollow. They are full of content, but very little of it remains meaningfully unknown. The map explains too much too early. The icons arrive before wonder does. Exploration becomes navigation. Discovery becomes route optimization.

The world may still be large. But it no longer feels deep.

The difference between hiding and inviting

Curiosity doesn’t come from total obscurity. A game that tells us nothing at all is rarely mysterious for long. It usually just becomes tiring.

What curiosity needs is something more delicate than hiddenness. It needs invitation. The player must feel three things at once:

• that something is there,

• that it matters,

• and that it is not yet fully understood.

That balance is hard to get right. Reveal too little, and the mystery feels arbitrary. Reveal too much, and the question dies before it can breathe. The games that stay with us tend to understand this rhythm intuitively. They offer fragments, not blanks. They give just enough shape for attention to latch onto.

That’s part of what makes The Witness so absorbing. At first, the island seems to be full of elegant but separate puzzle spaces. But over time, something shifts. You start noticing that the world itself is participating. A branch, a shadow, a line in the landscape suddenly resembles a puzzle. A hill becomes legible. An accidental-looking arrangement becomes intentional. And the thrill of that moment is hard to overstate. Because you are not just solving what the game placed in front of you. You are learning to see differently. The world starts to feel less like a backdrop and more like a text you were previously walking past half-blind.

That’s one of my favorite forms of curiosity in games. Not the desire to get the answer. The experience of becoming able to notice the question.

Curiosity as interpretation

Some of the richest forms of curiosity have almost nothing to do with physical exploration.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a perfect example. What pulls you through that game is not the promise of loot or spectacle, but the slow reconstruction of a catastrophe. A ship returns empty. Its crew is gone. You move through frozen moments of the past, trying to understand who these people were, how they died, and how all these separate tragedies fit together.

At first, it feels impossible. There are too many faces. Too many names. Too many details that don’t yet mean anything. But then one accent connects to one memory. One uniform clarifies a role. One relationship reshapes another scene. A person who was once just part of the noise starts to become distinct.

And that transformation, from chaos into legibility, is where so much of the pleasure lives. Not because the game “gives” you the truth, but because it asks you to build one carefully, attentively, and with enough humility to revise it when needed.

That’s a different kind of discovery. Less like uncovering treasure. More like earning understanding. And I think players feel that difference very deeply. Because understanding that comes through our own attention carries emotional weight. It feels less like information received and more like reality slowly becoming available to us.

The courage to let players not know

There’s a quiet bravery in designing for curiosity. It means trusting that players can survive temporary uncertainty. That confusion, in the right amount, is not always a design failure. That not knowing can be productive before it becomes frustrating. It also means resisting the urge to explain the world before the player has had the chance to ask anything of it.

Tunic is lovely here. So much of its magic comes from the way meaning is present but incomplete. Its scattered manual pages feel like artifacts from a world that makes sense on its own terms, even if you haven’t earned access to those terms yet. The diagrams, symbols, hints, and half-legible instructions all create a specific feeling: that the game is not empty, not random, not withholding for the sake of obscurity, just waiting for you to grow into its language.

That feeling matters. Because curiosity doesn’t thrive in emptiness. It thrives in contact with something that seems to exceed us. A fragment. A pattern. A promise. Not an answer, but the sense that an answer exists, and that the world is coherent enough to be worth pursuing.

Curiosity isn’t just for exploration games

We often associate curiosity with exploration-heavy games, but really it can appear almost anywhere.

In strategy games, curiosity lives in systems: What happens if I try this? What hidden interaction have I missed? What kind of world emerges if I push here instead of there?

In mastery-driven games, it lives in mechanics: Why did that work? What rule am I only beginning to glimpse? What becomes possible if I approach this differently?

In multiplayer spaces, curiosity can become social: What is this person trying to do? Why did they hesitate? Why were they generous there, and ruthless here?

In narrative games, curiosity often becomes emotional or interpretive: What happened in this place? Why did this character say that? What truth is the story circling without naming yet?

So curiosity isn’t really about genre. It’s about meaningful uncertainty. More specifically, uncertainty that the player feels invited to resolve through their own attention.

Why curiosity feels so meaningful

I think curiosity matters so much because it changes the player’s relationship to the world. A heavily guided game says: here is what matters. A curious game asks: what are you beginning to notice? That’s a profound difference. In one, significance is assigned from the outside. In the other, significance emerges through attention.

The player doesn’t just consume a world. They slowly come into contact with it. They build a sense of what matters by staying with what they don’t yet understand.

And maybe that’s why curiosity can feel so resonant. It mirrors something larger than play: the human desire not just to control reality, but to orient ourselves inside it. To move from fragmentation toward coherence. To stand before something strange and, through patience, become a little less separate from it.

In that sense, curiosity isn’t only about finding answers. It is often the first form of relationship. We become curious about what we sense has depth. We keep looking because the world feels capable of answering back, not necessarily with words, but with pattern, implication, history, structure.

This is where curiosity begins to tip into wonder. Not when the world overwhelms us, but when it begins, slowly, to respond.

Designing for wonder

If curiosity is an architecture of not-yet-knowing, then designing for it means designing for tempo. For restraint. For trust. For the emotional pacing of uncertainty.

Games that create wonder often do a few things especially well:

• They let questions arrive before answers do.

• They distribute knowledge across spaces, systems, and fragments instead of packaging it all at once.

• They make mystery feel meaningful rather than arbitrary.

• They allow understanding itself to function as progress.

• And they trust the player enough not to rush in and collapse ambiguity the moment it appears.

That doesn’t mean every game should be obscure. Or that clarity is the enemy. Only that wonder requires a certain amount of protected uncertainty. The unknown has to remain alive long enough for attention to gather around it. Because wonder is rarely born from perfect information. It is born from the feeling that the world is intelligible, but not yet exhausted.

The question that matters

In a medium so often organized around efficiency, progression, and reward, curiosity can seem almost fragile. It asks designers to do something counterintuitive. Leave room. Let some things stay unresolved a little longer. Trust that confusion does not always have to be immediately repaired. And when that works, something subtle changes in the player.

They stop asking: What do I do next?

And begin asking: What is this place? Why does it feel this way? What happened here? How does all of this fit together? What am I missing?

Those are different questions. They don’t come from obedience. They come from attention. And attention, when held open long enough by mystery, becomes a form of care.

That’s why curiosity matters. Because it turns exploration into interpretation. Interpretation into relationship. And relationship into wonder.

But while we play, something quieter is happening, not as a question we ask, but as a movement we feel.

Attention settles. Habits form. Certain ways of acting begin to feel natural. Without quite noticing, we start inhabiting a point of view. Not the character’s, exactly. Not the one the story announces. But a way of being inside the situation. Because games don’t only simulate worlds. They simulate selves.

They place us inside structures of action and consequence, and invite us to move, choose, persist. Over time, those movements stop feeling hypothetical. They become familiar. What’s explored isn’t just the environment. It’s a posture. A temperament. A version of the self that forms through repetition. We aren’t asked who we are. We find out, slowly, by doing.

And that “doing” matters more than we like to admit. Social psychology has long suggested that we often infer who we are from what we repeatedly enact, especially when the situation is ambiguous, and we can’t lean on a ready-made script. The self isn’t only a story we tell; it’s also a pattern that settles.

Games are unusually good at creating those patterns, because they don’t offer a single choice and move on. They build a small gravity field. They reward certain reflexes. They make certain options feel elegant, efficient, clean. Then they ask you to live inside that shape for hours.

This is why play can feel like identity work without ever announcing itself as such. Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius called them possible selves: the felt images of who we might become, who we hope to become, who we fear becoming. Not a fixed identity. A landscape of futures with emotional charge. Games don’t just show that landscape. They let you walk around inside it.

In real life, experimenting with identity is expensive. Being ruthless costs you relationships. Being generous costs you time. Being authoritarian costs you the trust of others. Even small experiments leave marks.

Games lower the cost. Not the emotional cost, but the real-world consequence cost. They create a rehearsal room: you can try on a disposition and see what it feels like from the inside. Not as belief. As habit. As muscle memory. As a way of moving through a world. And that is the quiet potency: a game doesn’t only ask what you choose. It trains what you reach for when there’s pressure. When there’s temptation. When no one is watching. When the “optimal” path is sitting there, gleaming, and something in you hesitates.

Even our avatars matter here. Research on the “Proteus effect” suggests that the way we represent ourselves in virtual environments can shift our behavior, not because we’re tricked, but because the self is responsive to its own cues. We adapt to what we embody. We lean toward what we practice.

So over time, play becomes less like watching a character arc and more like learning a personal dialect: the particular ways you solve, harm, protect, dominate, sacrifice, endure. A game gives you a small life, and you start to recognize your own handwriting in it.

That’s the strange intimacy of games: they don’t just let us escape who we are. They let us try on who we could be, safely, repeatedly, in motion, until the posture starts to feel like it belongs to us.

Identity as Possibility

Psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius once described identity not as a fixed trait, but as a landscape of imagined futures, possible selves.

Who we might become. Who we hope to become. Who we fear becoming.

These imagined selves quietly guide motivation, emotion, and behaviour. Often more strongly than the person we believe ourselves to be right now.

Games activate this system almost effortlessly. Because unlike books or films, they don’t ask, “What would this character do?” They ask something more intimate: What will you do, if this is who you are?

Identification Beyond Heroes

This is also why we are so often drawn to characters who are morally compromised. Not the clean heroes. Not the ones who always know the right thing to do. But the ones who hesitate. Who justify themselves. Who cross lines slowly, one reasonable step at a time.

The Joker. Walter White (Breaking Bad). Dexter Morgan (Dexter).

Games that do the same thing:

Joel (The Last of Us). Kratos (God of War).

Characters whose actions we may not approve of, and yet, somehow, recognize. It’s tempting to say we’re fascinated by them because they’re extreme, or transgressive, or shocking. But that explanation stays on the surface. A quieter truth is closer to home: most of us do not experience ourselves as pure heroes. We know our own contradictions. The small selfishnesses we excuse. The moments we stay silent when we should speak. The rationalizations we use to protect our pride, our comfort, our sense of control.

Morally ambiguous characters don’t ask us to admire them. They ask us to understand them. And in that understanding, something subtle happens: we are allowed to acknowledge parts of ourselves that don’t fit heroic narratives.

Games, in particular, are powerful here, because they don’t just show us compromised characters. They let us act from within their logic. They place us in situations where no option feels clean. Where every choice carries a cost.

The Last of Us Part II makes that cost bodily. It doesn’t just ask you to witness a conflict and take sides. It asks you to inhabit both. To move through the world first with Ellie, then with Abby, to feel how conviction hardens into tunnel vision, how grief turns into appetite, how “justice” becomes a story you tell yourself so you can keep going. One half of the game trains your allegiance so thoroughly that it feels like identity. Then it hands you the person you were primed to hate and says: walk. Not as a twist. As a method.

Because once you’ve spent hours moving as Abby, searching for friends, caring for someone weaker, flinching at the consequences of violence you used to cheer for, the moral geometry shifts. Not because the game suddenly declares anyone innocent, but because it makes the simplest truth impossible to ignore: everyone is the hero of their own survival. And when you have played that survival from the inside, the old comfort of “us versus them” stops fitting.

That’s the kind of discomfort only games can generate. Film can show you two perspectives. Games can make you perform them, long enough that empathy stops being an opinion and becomes a physical memory. Where “doing the right thing” depends on whose perspective we adopt. And because we are acting, not watching, identification runs deeper.

We don’t feel sympathy from a distance. We feel implication.

This is where identity rehearsal becomes most potent, not when we play at being virtuous, but when we explore the uncomfortable middle ground between intention and outcome. Not who we want to be seen as. But who we might become under pressure.

Morally questionable characters resonate because they mirror a truth we rarely say out loud: being human is less about purity than navigation. And games, at their best, don’t ask us to pretend otherwise.

Practicing a Moral Posture

Dishonored doesn’t ask you to choose between good and evil once. It asks you to inhabit a way of moving through the world. You can play Corvo as a shadow: patient, restrained, avoiding death whenever possible. Or as a force: efficient, terrifying, treating the city as expendable.

What matters isn’t the ending slide. It’s the repetition. Every non-lethal path trains patience. Every lethal shortcut trains dominance. Over hours, the game quietly poses a question: Is this who you are when no one is watching?

Players often describe feeling changed afterward, not because the game moralised, but because it trained a disposition. Identity here isn’t selected. It’s practiced.

Identity Under Pressure

Baldur’s Gate 3 makes that rehearsal social. You’re not only deciding what you believe. You’re deciding who you are around others. Companions react. Relationships deepen or fracture. Trust is earned, broken, leveraged.

A player might begin with an abstract intention: “I’ll play a selfish character this time.” And then a companion looks disappointed. Or leaves. Or confronts them. Suddenly the experiment feels personal. The game becomes a rehearsal space for questions that rarely appear cleanly in real life:

• How far does my ambition go when it costs me connection?

• Do I value being right more than being trusted?

• Who am I when loyalty conflicts with power?

These aren’t narrative themes. They’re identity stress tests.

When Identity Becomes Structure

Crusader Kings III dissolves the idea of a single self entirely. You don’t play a character. You play a lineage. Traits, values, compromises pass from one ruler to the next. You might begin as a compassionate leader, then inherit a paranoid tyrant, then guide a child shaped by the consequences of both.

Here, identity isn’t role-played. It’s systemic. The game teaches a quiet, unsettling lesson: values propagate, but so do compromises. And it sharpens something even more personal: the moment you realise your own beliefs don’t align with what the system pays out. You may want to rule with mercy, restraint, dignity, and then watch the world reward paranoia. Punish softness. Turn generosity into weakness. The incentives don’t just shape outcomes. They pressure your self-image.

That’s why so many players describe a kind of uncomfortable recognition: “I didn’t want to become this ruler. But the game rewarded me for it.”

The tension isn’t really about being “good” or “bad.” It’s about friction between the person you think you are and the person the environment makes easiest to be. About how, over time, repeated rewards don’t just change your strategy, they start negotiating with your values.

Why This Creates Meaning

Meaning doesn’t arrive only as an interpretation of the world. It often arrives as a recognition of the self in motion. That is where games differ from most other media. They don’t just offer characters to understand or viewpoints to evaluate. They give us constraints and ask us to inhabit them. To move, decide, persist. And once a posture has been inhabited long enough: cautious, ruthless, merciful, impatient, loyal, the mind begins to store it less like a hypothetical and more like a lived pattern.

Psychology has a name for this dynamic: possible selves. Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius used the term to describe the imagined versions of ourselves we might become, hope to become, or fear becoming. These selves are not idle fantasies. They guide motivation and emotion precisely because they make futures feel reachable and personal.

Games intensify this mechanism because they don’t leave it abstract. They add repetition. Feedback. Consequence. You don’t just imagine being the kind of person who sacrifices power for care. You practice it, again and again, often under pressure, often when an easier or more efficient option is available. Over time, the question quietly shifts from What would someone like that do? to What do I do when I’m here?

There is another layer at work as well: self-perception through action. We often infer who we are by watching what we do, especially when the situation does not force our hand. Choices that feel optional but still cost something carry disproportionate weight. This is why moral friction in games can feel personal. You are not just learning what you believe in principle; you are discovering what you will do when belief has a price.

Sometimes, the system itself becomes part of that discovery. When a game rewards domination and penalizes care, players often feel a split emerge: this works, but it isn’t me. That tension between what is effective and what feels aligned, is where meaning frequently appears. Not as a lesson delivered, but as dissonance that refuses to settle. Festinger’s old insight still applies: contradiction demands resolution, because the mind wants coherence.

Games exert unusual force here because the self they invite us into is not only narrative. It is behavioral. Even small repeated actions: how we move through space, who we protect, what we exploit, what we leave untouched, … can begin to feel natural or alien. Research on the Proteus effect points to one facet of this: changes in self-representation can influence subsequent behavior, even outside the immediate play context.

None of this means games overwrite values or turn players into something they were not. The evidence doesn’t support that fear. What games do instead is subtler and more interesting: they let players rehearse ways of acting and notice which ones feel aligned, which feel hollow, and which create discomfort they can’t quite explain. Meaning often appears not when a system shapes behavior, but when the player resists it.

So when players say, “That game changed how I think,” they are often naming something very concrete. A pattern of action, repeated under constraint, emotionally charged, tied to consequence. Not indoctrination. Not replacement. But rehearsal quietly shifting what feels possible, permissible, or true.

Why This Matters for Designers

If games are identity rehearsal spaces, then design choices carry quiet weight. Design isn’t only about balance, pacing, or fun. It’s about what dispositions are rewarded. What behaviours become effortless over time. What kind of player the system gently shapes.

Designers aren’t just building mechanics. They’re building practice fields for selves. The question shifts from “What does my game say?” to something more intimate: Who does my game let the player become: safely, repeatedly, and often without noticing?

Becoming, Not Consuming

Games don’t only give us stories. They give us temporary lives. Lives where we can try on values, test limits, fail without ruin, and return changed: sometimes subtly, sometimes deeply.

Meaning doesn’t always arrive as insight. Sometimes it arrives as recognition: “I didn’t know I would act like that.” And in that moment, play becomes something rare. Not escape. Not fantasy. But rehearsal for being human.

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References:

Oliver, M. B., & Bartsch, A. (2010) Appreciation as audience response: Exploring entertainment gratifications beyond hedonism. Human Communication Research, 36(1), 53–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2009.01368.x

Oliver, M. B., & Bartsch, A. (2011) Appreciation of entertainment. Journal of Media Psychology, 23(1), 29–33. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000029

Raney, A. A., & Oliver, M. B. (2014) Media entertainment as moral psychology. In Media and the Moral Mind (pp. 1–22). Routledge.

Haidt, J. (2003) Elevation and the positive psychology of morality. In Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-Lived (pp. 275–289). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10594-012

Bloom, P. (2010) How pleasure works: The new science of why we like what we like. W. W. Norton & Company.

Bem, D. J. (1972) Self-perception theory. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 1–62). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60024-6

Festinger, L. (1957) A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Sicart, M. (2009) The Ethics of Computer Games. MIT Press.

Bopp, J. A., Mekler, E. D., & Opwis, K. (2016) Negative emotion, positive experience? CHI 2016 Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858227

Cohen, J. (2001) Defining identification: A theoretical look at identification with media characters. Mass Communication & Society, 4(3), 245–264. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327825MCS0403_01

Yee, N., & Bailenson, J. N. (2007) The Proteus effect: The effect of transformed self-representation on behavior. Human Communication Research, 33(3), 271–290. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2007.00299.x

Yee, N., Bailenson, J., & Ducheneaut, N. (2009) The Proteus effect: Implications of transformed digital self-representation. Communication Research, 36(2), 285–312.

Rosa, H. (2019) Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity Press.

Games don’t teach morality through lectures, they make us live it. Every hesitation, every instinct, every moment we pause before pressing a button reveals more about who we are than what we win.

Unlike other media, games don’t just depict morality. They simulate it. They make us act on it, often before we have the words to explain why.

The Architecture of Intuition

As psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2001) describes, moral judgment rarely begins with reasoning. It begins with intuition: fast, automatic, emotional, followed by a slower process of justification. “The emotional dog wags the rational tail,” Haidt famously said.

We like to think our ethical decisions in games are rational, calculated, consistent, thoughtful. But in truth, they often mirror our real-world impulses: our empathy, our sense of fairness, our loyalties, or even our disgust.

Haidt’s moral foundations theory maps five core moral systems shared by most humans:

• Care / Harm — the urge to protect others from suffering

• Fairness / Cheating — the instinct for justice and reciprocity

• Loyalty / Betrayal — our sense of belonging to a group

• Authority / Subversion — respect for structure and tradition

• Sanctity / Degradation — the feeling that some acts are sacred or defiling

Each person holds these foundations in different proportions, shaped by experience and culture. And each can be activated in play: sometimes intentionally by the designer, sometimes unconsciously by the player.

A mother feeding her child in a cutscene may prime the care foundation. A dialogue about betrayal can awaken loyalty. Even the sound of a soldier calling you “brother” before you pull the trigger can create an instant ethical pause.

Morality, in other words, is context-sensitive code, responsive, fluid, and deeply human.

How Games Evoke Moral Reflection

Moral gameplay doesn’t emerge from the presence of choice alone, but from what those choices mean. (Spoiler ahead)

1. The Cost of Empathy

At the start of Detroit: Become Human, the world trains you to see androids as objects. They are manufactured helpers, bought and sold, addressed as “it,” and treated as malfunctioning tools when they deviate. The interface reinforces this view: androids are evaluated through performance metrics, obedience levels, and probability trees. They exist to optimize outcomes.

You play within that logic. You follow orders. You assess risks. You make decisions the way the system expects you to.

Then the game slowly undermines that certainty. Through a series of small, intimate interactions: calming a frightened child, noticing a trembling hand, hearing an android speak with fear rather than error, the frame shifts. These moments aren’t dramatic set pieces. They are deliberately quiet. They ask you to attend, not to act. And in doing so, they awaken something intuitive: care.

By the time the game later presents you with a choice that requires harming or sacrificing an android you’ve come to empathize with, the mechanics haven’t changed. It’s still a button prompt. Still a branching decision. Still a system asking you to optimize.

But you have changed.

Your thumb hesitates, not because the choice is unclear, but because two truths now collide: the rules of the world still treat androids as expendable, while your emotions no longer do. That hesitation is the point.

This is where moral dissonance lives: in the gap between what the system encourages (obedience, efficiency, order) and what the player has learned to value through lived interaction. The game doesn’t resolve that tension for you. It doesn’t tell you what the “right” choice is.

Instead, it turns the decision into a mirror, reflecting not the character’s morality, but your own. The system becomes a moral laboratory, not by teaching ethics, but by forcing you to feel the cost of applying rules that no longer fit the person you’ve become through play.

2. The Collapse of Certainty

Spec Ops: The Line begins exactly like a conventional military shooter. You are Captain Martin Walker, sent into a sandstorm-ravaged Dubai on what appears to be a straightforward rescue mission. The framing is familiar and reassuring: you are a soldier with good intentions, clear orders, and a presumed moral high ground. The story tells you that you are here to help. The mechanics reinforce that belief.

Combat rewards efficiency. Headshots feel good. Progress is tied to moving forward through violence. Every system the player understands from years of shooters is intact: shoot enemies, advance, succeed.

Nothing initially asks you to question this logic.

As the campaign continues, the narrative tone begins to fracture. Radio messages grow ambiguous. Civilians appear in combat zones. Allies argue. Walker’s confidence erodes. But crucially, the mechanics do not change. The game still asks you to solve every problem the same way: push forward, eliminate resistance.

Then comes the white phosphorus scene. The game presents it not as a moral choice, but as a mechanical solution. From a distance, enemies are blocking your path. The interface offers white phosphorus as the effective tool. There is no alternative route. No refusal button. No warning that matters. You deploy it because the game has trained you to do so.

Only afterward does the game reveal the truth: the figures you incinerated were civilians taking shelter. The camera forces you to walk through the aftermath. The system that previously rewarded efficiency now shows you the cost, without changing the rules that led you there.

This is the core dissonance:

• The mechanics still treat violence as progress.

• The narrative now treats that same violence as a moral failure.

You are not punished mechanically. You are not absolved narratively. You are left holding both truths at once.

The moment is devastating not because of the event itself, but because of what it reveals: you didn’t commit the atrocity out of cruelty or intent. You committed it because you trusted the system. Because you followed the genre’s logic without questioning it.

Spec Ops: The Line doesn’t ask, “Why did Walker do this?” It asks, quietly and uncomfortably: “Why did you?”

That is why this is a true example of ludonarrative dissonance, not a mismatch by accident, but a deliberate design where story and system pull apart just far enough to force ethical reflection. The game doesn’t teach morality. It exposes habit.

And in that exposure, play becomes introspection.

3. The Illusion of Autonomy

Sometimes moral design fails not because it lacks choice, but because it pretends to offer it.

In Fallout 4, you play a survivor in a post-apocalyptic world, searching for your missing child while navigating competing political factions. Each faction claims to represent a different moral vision for the future: order, freedom, technological progress, or human preservation.

On the surface, this looks like a classic ethical setup. You are asked to decide who deserves power and what kind of society should emerge from the ruins.

But as the game unfolds, something subtle happens. No matter which faction you support, progression funnels toward the same solution: large-scale violence becomes unavoidable. Diplomacy is temporary. Coexistence collapses. Critical decisions are resolved through combat, not ethical trade-offs.

The game tells you you’re making a moral choice, but the systems restrict how that morality can be expressed.

You cannot meaningfully refuse violence. You cannot build a lasting alternative. You cannot challenge the structure of the conflict itself.

What remains is moral framing without moral agency.

The game resolves the tension for you by funneling every path back into the same violent resolution: once you commit to a faction, the narrative reassures you that violence was necessary, even inevitable. And when a system does that, when it answers the moral question instead of leaving it open, reflection quietly disappears. The dissonance is removed before it can do its work.

Instead of asking “What kind of world do I believe in?” the game ends up asking only “Which version of force do you prefer?”

That’s the difference between moral choice and moral performance and why simulated ethics can feel hollow when autonomy is constrained beneath the surface.

4. The Power of Social Presence

Morality is social. It doesn’t emerge from abstract rules, but from encountering another mind: a voice, a face, a plea that reminds us someone is there.

In Mass Effect, players are often asked to make decisions about entire species they’ve never met. One of the most famous moments involves the Rachni Queen, an alien creature initially framed as a dangerous monster responsible for past wars. Everything about the setup primes the player to eliminate a threat.

Then the Queen speaks. She doesn’t threaten or bargain. She explains. She describes her people as a chorus, a shared consciousness, and tells her story not with logic, but with voice, rhythm, and sorrow. Her words are layered with echo, almost musical, designed to feel less like dialogue and more like testimony.

In that moment, the choice stops feeling strategic. Many players spare her not because the game promises a reward, but because the sound design and performance transform an abstract enemy into a speaking subject. The moral weight doesn’t come from the decision screen, it comes from hearing someone ask to be understood.

That’s empathy encoded not in mechanics, but in presentation.

Metro Exodus explores the same principle from the opposite direction. For most of the game, enemies are masked, anonymous, and aggressive. They shout threats, rush the player, and behave like obstacles. Killing them feels procedural, part of surviving a hostile world.

Then something changes. Later encounters introduce enemies who surrender. They drop their weapons. They raise their hands. They beg. Some call out names. Some promise they don’t want to fight.

Mechanically, nothing has changed. You can still pull the trigger.

But psychologically, everything has. The moment an enemy reveals fear, voice, or intention, they stop functioning as a system element and re-enter the moral space. Pulling the trigger no longer feels like clearing a path, it feels like ending a life.

Across both games, the pattern is the same:

• When opponents are faceless, morality recedes.

• When humanity becomes perceptible, morality returns.

Not because the rules changed, but because perception did.

Beyond Right and Wrong: Moral Context in Systems and Worlds

Morality is never isolated to story beats. It’s also coded into systems and environments.

BioShock disguises ethical choice as mechanical optimization: harvesting or saving the Little Sisters. But each encounter is about empathy versus efficiency.

When you realize saving them still leads to success, the illusion of moral arithmetic collapses and the act itself becomes reflection.

Red Dead Redemption 2 embeds ethics into ecology. Using the wrong weapon ruins pelts and lowers sale prices; harming domesticated animals reduces honor.

The tactile act of cleaning your gun or brushing your horse builds a felt continuity of care, so loss stings even without a pop-up telling you so.

Even nature itself can become a moral presence. In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, liberating RDA sites allows surrounding biomes to recover over time, turning ecological care into a visible, systemic reward.

Designing the Space for Reflection

Moral engagement in games thrives in ambiguity. It requires space to feel before judging. That’s why good moral design doesn’t dictate what’s right, it gives room to wrestle with what’s human.

Three principles stand out:

1. Allow identification before dilemma. Build empathy first: through relationships, ritual, or shared vulnerability. A choice only matters if someone does.

2. Show consequence without condemnation. Players should see the emotional ripple of their actions, but not be punished for them. Guilt and pride are more powerful than “morality points.”

3. Keep resolution open. Ambiguity sustains reflection. When players can’t close the loop, they keep thinking and that’s where meaning grows.

The Ethics of Engagement

We don’t design morality to evaluate players. We design it to invite self-reflection, to let them see their values in motion.

A well-crafted moral game doesn’t ask, “Are you good?” It asks, “Who are you when no one is watching?”

As players, we are both actor and spectator: moral agents inside and outside the system. As designers, our responsibility is not to preach ethics, but to evoke it.

When we design for morality, we design for awareness, for that fragile, luminous moment when players realize their decisions have weight not because of scoreboards, but because of empathy.

And that’s where games stop being simulations and start being mirrors. Sometimes, that moment arrives not in a cutscene, but in stillness. A finger hovering over a trigger. A button press delayed by half a second longer than usual. A controller resting on a knee while the player stares at the screen, unsure how they feel about what they’re about to do.

That pause is the sound of dissonance working. Not as failure, but as awareness.

It’s the moment play turns inward and the player realizes the game is no longer asking them to act, but to reflect.

References

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Haidt, J. (2001). The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment. Psychological Review, 108(4), 814–834.

Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Pantheon Books.

Sicart, M. (2013). Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay. MIT Press.

Oliver, M. B., & Bartsch, A. (2011). Making Sense of Entertainment: Eudaimonic Appreciation as a Central Construct in the Entertainment Experience. Journal of Media Psychology.

Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge University Press.

Everything feels smooth. Balanced. Comfortable. But the moments that truly stay with us, the ones players name years later, the ones that change how they think, almost never feel harmonious.

They feel tense. Unsettling. Emotionally jagged.

Because meaning doesn’t live in comfort. Meaning lives in contradiction.

As Leon Festinger famously wrote in 1957: “The mind resists contradiction, but that resistance is where change begins.”

In games, that resistance becomes more than a feeling. It becomes structure, the psychological friction that turns mechanics into mirrors, and play into self-reflection. When what the player believes collides with what the system demands, something rare happens: They stop performing and start thinking.

Let’s explore how different forms of dissonance can create these moments, and why each one is a powerful design tool rather than a flaw.

1. Systeity

Some dissonance doesn’t come from story at all, but from systems that force the player to redefine what “success” means.

The ethics of efficiency

In Banished, you guide a small settlement through winter, famine, fire, and uncertainty. Every system pushes you toward optimization: gather wood, stockpile food, expand houses.

You find yourself doing things you’re not proud of:

• prioritizing food for children while the elderly go huSpec Ops: The Line begins like any conventional military shooter: you’re part of a Delta Force team sent into a ruined Dubai to find survivors and restore order. The story frames your mission as righteous — you’re here to help, to bring clarity to chaos.

  And the core loop fully supports that fantasy:

  – you move forward through linear combat spaces,

  – you eliminate whoever the game marks as “hostile”,

  – the only way to progress is to keep shooting.

  The game feels like every other modern military shooter: push ahead, clear the area, advance the mission.

  Then comes the white phosphorus sequence. Level design corners you into using a mortar loaded with a horrific weapon because every other tactical option appears blocked. You pull the trigger because that’s what the game has trained you to do: use the tools it gives you to solve the problem in front of you.

  When the smoke clears, you realize you didn’t just burn enemy combatants. You burned civilians — people huddled for shelter. Men, women, children.

  From that moment on, the story starts to come apart:

  – Walker becomes unstable and haunted,

  – characters question what you’re doing,

  – the world reflects the aftermath of your choices.

  But the mechanics do not change at all.

  You still move forward by shooting whoever stands in your way. Combat feels the same in your hands as it did before the atrocity.

  That’s the dissonance:

  – The narrative is now saying: “You crossed a line. You’re making things worse.”

  – The system is still saying: “Keep going. This is how you play.”

  The horror isn’t just in what you did — it’s in realizing you did it by following the shooter logic the genre has always trained you to obey.

  As Miguel Sicart puts it, “Players are not innocent.”

  Not because they choose violence in a vacuum, but because they follow mechanical incentives without questioning what those incentives ask of them.

  This is ludonarrative dissonance at its sharpest: the story and the system pull in opposite directions, and the player is trapped in between, forced to hold both truths at once.ngry,

• diverting firewood to build a clinic while families shiver,

• expanding housing knowing it might tip the whole town into starvation.

The contradiction is elegant and brutal: You can build a thriving settlement… but you will fail many of the people within it.

The game never judges you. Never moralizes. It just makes you live inside a system where survival and compassion can’t always coexist. That tension, the system asking one thing, your conscience whispering another, is what gives the experience meaning.

Not punishment. Not reward. Just dissonance.

2. When Story and Systems Betray Each Other

Sometimes the contradiction happens between what the game says and what it actually makes you do.

When the Story Reveals You Were Never the Hero

Spec Ops: The Line begins like any conventional military shooter: rescue survivors in Dubai, restore order, defeat hostile forces. The story frames your mission as heroic you’re here to help. And the mechanics fully support that fantasy:

• headshots = rewarded

• aggressive play = efficient

• pushing forward and killing enemies = the intended loop

Everything in the system tells you: “You are doing the right thing by shooting.”

But midway through the game, the story takes a sharp turn the mechanics don’t follow. You’re forced by level design, not by choice, to deploy white phosphorus. When the smoke clears, you realize you didn’t kill enemy combatants. You killed civilians who were seeking shelter.

At this point, the narrative shifts dramatically:

• Walker becomes shaken, unstable

• The story begins to question your mission

• Characters challenge your moral standing

• The game world reflects the cost of your actions

But the mechanics do not change at all. They still reward:

• precision kills

• aggressive advancement

• treating enemies as targets, not humans

You get the same XP. The same dopamine loop. The same instrumental logic: shoot = progress.

This is the dissonance:

Narrative truth: “You crossed a moral line. You’re making things worse.”

Mechanical truth: “Great job. Keep going.”

The horror is not the twist, it’s the contradiction. You are punished emotionally and rewarded systemically for the same action. This is what makes the game so devastating:

• The mechanics incentivize the mindset the narrative condemns.

• You didn’t commit an atrocity because you’re evil. You committed it because you followed the game’s rules too well.

• The game exposes how easily systems train obedience without reflection.

As Miguel Sicart writes: “Players are not innocent.” Not because they choose violence, but because they follow the logic of mechanical incentives.

This is ludonarrative dissonance at its sharpest: a game where the story and system pull in opposite directions and the player is trapped in the middle, forced to reconcile both truths at once.

3. Aesthetic Dissonance: When Beauty Hides Horror

Some games create meaning through contrast: a world so gorgeous you don’t notice the rot until you’re already attached.

Beauty as camouflage for tragedy

Hallownest is breathtaking. Ink-line architecture, melancholic music, a world that feels tender even in ruin. But beneath the beauty:

• Kingdoms collapsed

• Children sacrificed

• Infected minds twisted into violence

The player falls in love with the world just in time for the game to reveal its tragedy. The dissonance is emotional, not logical: beauty makes the horror hit harder.

This contrast awakens empathy, not just awareness.

4. Prosocial Dissonance — When Two Goods Cannot Coexist

Some contradictions in games aren’t about right vs. wrong. They’re about caring for two sides at once and realizing you cannot save both.

That’s a different kind of tension. Not moral. Not mechanical. But relational.

When Love Splits the Map in Half

The game begins gently: You become a professor at a military academy, teaching one of three student groups. For dozens of hours you:

• train them

• eat meals with them

• help them through fears and insecurities

• watch them grow stronger

• listen to them laugh together

They’re not “units.” They’re your kids. You shape their futures, not by telling them what to be, but by guiding who they become. And just when your bond feels unbreakable, the game drops the twist:

A war begins. Your former students are now your enemies.

Not narrative villains. Not faceless soldiers. The same young people you mentored:

• the shy kid who finally found confidence

• the noble who learned humility

• the student who relied on you for emotional stability

• the friend who trusted you more than anyone

Now they stand on the opposite side of the battlefield. Not because they turned evil, but because their ideals diverged from yours. And the game doesn’t label one path “correct.” Every house believes it is fighting for justice. Every leader has a coherent political vision shaped by their trauma. Every student is trying to protect something precious to them.

You are forced to harm people you still care about. Not because you want to. Because the world split in a way your relationships cannot survive.

That is prosocial dissonance: When two values you emotionally endorse collide, and choosing one means betraying another.

It’s a form of contradiction uniquely suited to games, because:

• you built these relationships through interaction

• your attachment grew slowly, through dozens of small choices

• the war doesn’t undo your affection

• your enemies still call you “Professor” when you fight them

Nothing feels clean. Nothing feels triumphant. Victory is measured in heartbreak. The game doesn’t ask: “Which side is right?” It asks: “What does loyalty mean when everyone you care about needs something different from you?” That’s the kind of tension players remember years later, not because it felt good, but because it felt human.

5. Mechanical Betrayal — When Input and Emotion Diverge

Some games break their own emotional contract on purpose. When the kill feels wrong

Shadow of the Tomb Raider: Stealth kills usually feel clean, efficient, mechanical. But there is a moment in this game when Lara performs one that is… different.

The camera lingers. Her breath shakes. She looks horrified by her own hands.

The mechanics haven’t changed, the meaning has. The system still rewards efficiency. The character suffers from it. The dissonance is startling:

You wanted mastery. She feels remorse.

A tiny fracture opens between input and identity, and that space becomes emotional reflection.

6. Temporal Dissonance — When the World Moves and You Don’t

Empathy in a time loop

Some games create dissonance not through morality or choice, but through time: what it gives, what it erases, and what it refuses to let you keep.

Empathy in a World That Forgets You

Majora’s Mask: The premise is simple but devastating:

• The world will end in three days.

• You can reset time by playing a song.

• Every reset erases everything you’ve done.

• Only you remember.

You move through the same 72 hours again and again, but the people inside the world don’t know they’re repeating their lives. They wake up hopeful. They argue. They fall in love. They grieve. They fear the moon that is slowly falling.

And every time the clock runs out, you go back to Day 1…

…but they don’t remember anything you did for them.

• You help a couple reunite …
  (reset)

  and they are strangers again.

• You save a girl’s farm from bandits …

  (reset)

  and the farm is threatened once more.

• You listen to someone confess their fear —

  (reset)

  and they must face it again, without you.

This is the contradiction Majora’s Mask makes you live with: Your compassion matters to you, but it doesn’t last for them.

Every act of kindness is temporary. Every good deed is undone by the next dawn. Every relationship resets the moment you save their world. You can stop the apocalypse, yes. But you cannot stop these people from forgetting the moments that meant something to you. This is temporal dissonance: When the player’s emotional investment persists, but the world’s memory does not.

It creates a strange, beautiful form of meaning: You help people not because it will endure, but because they need it now. Majora’s Mask flips the moral logic of games: You don’t act for reward. You don’t act for progress. You act because compassion is worth expressing even when it won’t be remembered.

Meaning emerges not from permanence but from presence. Not from victory, but from care in a world where nothing lasts.

7. Epistemic Dissonance — When Understanding Becomes Impossible

Some contradictions don’t come from morality or emotion. They come from not knowing and having to act anyway.

Interpretation without certainty

Heaven’s Vault: You uncover an ancient language one glyph at a time. You play an archaeologist uncovering a lost civilization through fragments of an ancient language. Nothing is translated for you. Nothing is confirmed. You learn the language the way real archaeologists do:

• by guessing,

• by comparing symbols,

• by watching patterns repeat,

• by stitching meaning from incomplete evidence.

But here is the twist: The game never tells you if you’re right. You might translate a line of text as: “The emperor ascended.” But it could also mean: “The emperor vanished.” Or: “The emperor was taken.”

Every interpretation shapes how you understand the world’s history and the game lets you keep going even when your theory might be wrong.

At first, this feels empowering: you’re discovering a culture, a language, a past.

Then comes the dissonance: The more you learn, the less certain you become. Some glyphs contradict earlier ones. Some symbols change meaning based on context. Some inscriptions undermine the stories you believed were already true. You begin to realize the awful, beautiful truth: You cannot know everything. And yet you must keep interpreting.

This is epistemic dissonance: The tension between wanting certainty and building meaning out of ambiguity. As the philosopher Paul Ricoeur wrote: “Interpretation begins where certainty ends.”

Heaven’s Vault forces players to live inside that space, the space where knowledge is temporary, fragile, reversible. It teaches something subtle and profound: Understanding is not the act of finding the truth. It’s the act of committing to a truth you might need to revise.

You don’t solve the world. You participate in its interpretation. And that makes the player feel something rarely explored in games: Humility. Not ignorance, but the emotional acceptance that reality can be understood, just never perfectly.

Why Dissonance Matters

Meaning doesn’t come from clarity. Meaning comes from tension. From contradictions that refuse to resolve. From choices that leave echoes. From moments that make us hesitate.

Dissonance is not the opposite of fun.

Dissonance is the shadow that gives fun its shape.

It’s the part players remember because it forced them inward, to reconcile emotion, action, and identity.

Games have a unique power here. They don’t just show contradiction. They make you enact it. And as players metabolize that discomfort, they discover something essential: The most human moments in games are the ones that don’t feel good.

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References:

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. Cambridge University Press.

Sicart, M. (2013). Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay. MIT Press.

Bartsch, A., & Oliver, M. B. (2011). “Making sense of entertainment: Eudaimonic appreciation as a central construct in the entertainment experience.” Journal of Media Psychology.

LeDoux, J. (2002). Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are. Penguin.
Andrews-Hanna, J. R. (2012). “The brain’s default network and its adaptive role in internal mentation.” Neuropsychologia.

Immordino-Yang, M. H., McColl, A., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. (2009). “Neural correlates of admiration and compassion.” PNAS.

Spreng, R. N., & Grady, C. L. (2010). “Patterns of brain activity supporting autobiographical memory, prospection, and theory of mind.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Insight doesn’t arrive because a character explains something profound or because a cutscene spells out a moral lesson. Insight emerges when a game hands us an emotional problem we cannot instantly resolve, when we’re asked to sit with discomfort, contradiction, or consequences that echo louder than expected.

As Oliver & Bartsch (2011) write: “Eudaimonic appreciation arises when entertainment invites us to engage with meaning, morality, or the human condition.”

Games can create that invitation not only through narrative, but through interaction, through mechanics, agency, and the quiet space around consequences. Across research, these moments tend to arise from three emotional pathways:

1. Cognitive tension

2. Social resonance

3. Self-transcendence

Let’s explore how games use these forces not to entertain us more, but to help us understand more.

1. Cognitive Tension: When the Game Refuses to Comfort You

Leon Festinger defined cognitive dissonance as: “The discomfort that arises from holding two inconsistent cognitions at once.” Festinger (1957)

Most games protect us from this feeling. But the ones that create insight do the opposite, they trust us enough not to resolve the tension for us.
(note: ahead examples include spoilers)

In Shadow of the Colossus you’re told exactly what to do: find the colossus, climb it, strike its weak point. It’s a textbook power fantasy, a puzzle, a boss fight, a test of skill.

And when you finally reach the top and drive the sword down, it feels like mastery. You solved the mechanic. You did what the game asked of you.

But then everything changes, instantly: The creature doesn’t roar in rage. It doesn’t lash out. It lets out a sound that feels wrong for a victory moment. A sound closer to pain. Or sorrow.

The camera lingers. The light drains from the sky. Wander collapses as if the act itself has taken something from him. And this towering being, who never hated you, never even struck you in anger, falls like an ancient animal who didn’t understand why it had to die.

The game never tells you you’ve done something wrong. But the atmosphere makes you feel it.

What began as a moment of competence quietly transforms into a moment of grief, and that emotional contradiction becomes the source of insight: You fulfilled the mechanic, but you might have violated something human.

You are left with two truths:

• You succeeded.

• You might have done something terrible.

Oliver & Bartsch describe these blended emotions as “The process through which mixed emotions yield meaning.”

The game doesn’t explain anything. It simply reflects your action back at you and trusts you to feel the weight of it.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey - Its climactic moment should have been extraordinary: you stand across from your sibling, your family, and the game asks you to choose.

Forgive them or kill them.
Love or justice.
Hope or fear.

For a brief heartbeat, it feels like the world is holding its breath. The music softens. The air tightens. This could be the kind of choice that lodges itself under your ribs, a moment you carry with you long after the credits.

But the moment never deepens, because the game rushes to protect you from discomfort.

If you forgive them: They reform instantly, as if years of manipulation, trauma, and violence resolve in a single cutscene. The family reunites, the harmony restored and there is no emotional cost.

If you kill them: Characters immediately reassure you that you did what you had to do. It was necessary. It was justified.

You’re absolved before doubt has a chance to take shape. And so the emotional tension collapses. No grief. No long, quiet walk afterward. No moment where the world feels heavier because of what you chose. Nothing the player must metabolize.

It’s a reminder that a choice alone doesn’t create insight. Insight comes from the space after the choice, the silence where reflection is supposed to grow.

Odyssey had all the ingredients for a meaningful dissonance, the kind that could have carved itself into memory. But instead, it clears the sky before the storm can break.

As Vorderer & Reinecke (2015) note: “Eudaimonic engagement requires unresolved affective states that prompt reflection.” Odyssey doesn’t allow those states to exist and the insight dissolves before it can form.

Insight is not triggered by choice. It is triggered by the absence of narrative reassurance.

2. Social Resonance: When Responsibility Becomes a Mirror

Some insights don’t come from moral puzzles but from connection, from feeling responsible for someone who only exists inside the game’s fiction.

Psychologists call this self–other overlap (Aron et al., 1991): a moment when another being’s experience becomes part of your own.

Life Is Strange never pits you against simple moral binaries. Instead, it asks you to choose between two forms of care, two forms of loss.

When your decisions hurt someone you love, the game doesn’t fade to black. It lets you see the pain on their face. It lets silence do the talking. One player said: “I kept thinking for days whether my decision made me a bad person.”

This isn’t about branching choices. It’s about emotional agency, a rare moment when a system feels like a mirror, not a machine.

There is a moment in The Last of Us Part II that made me put the controller down.

I’ve always believed that people make sense once you understand their context, their fears, their values, their wounds. That matters deeply to me. And yet, in moments of emotion, even the best intentions can narrow our perspective.

When the game shifted and forced me to play as Abby, I resisted. Ellie felt familiar, anchored in my existing emotional map. Abby felt like an intruder.

But slowly, something remarkable happened: When I realized Ellie and Abby weren’t opposites. They were parallels, two people shaped by pain, loyalty, and love, surviving the only way they knew how.

I wasn’t comparing characters anymore. I was comparing perspectives.

The game never lectured me. It simply gave me enough of someone else’s context for empathy to become inevitable.

There is a small, easily overlooked story in Guild Wars 2, an NPC quietly mourning her sister. No quest marker blinking with urgency. No sweeping soundtrack. Just a woman sitting with a grief the world has already moved past.

She talks to you softly, almost apologetically, as if she doesn’t want to inconvenience you with her pain. She tells you how she still speaks to her sister sometimes, out of habit, or hope, or the kind of love that refuses to end just because a life did. It’s the kind of detail you only notice if you’re really listening.

Most players walk past her. Why wouldn’t they? The game doesn’t insist on meaning here. But for one player, who had lost their own sister, this small moment became something entirely different. They wrote: “After reliving my grief all over again in this moment, I pushed through it and felt closer to closure.”

Not because the game commanded an emotion. Not because a cutscene demanded tears. But because, for a brief moment, fiction brushed against something unbearably real and the boundary between world and player blurred.

No dramatic scoring. No cathartic monologue. No narrative fireworks.

Just resonance, the kind Hartmut Rosa (2018) describes as “a living, responsive relationship between self and world.”

And here’s the quiet truth designers often forget: Not every player will feel this. But the ones who can, will feel it deeply.

Because when a moment touches on something nearly universal - grief, family, love, loss - a player’s own life can flow into the cracks of the narrative. Meaning arises not because the game contains it, but because the player brings it.

Insight grows in that intersection where design creates space, and the player fills it with something human.

3. Self-Transcendence: When Games Point Beyond the Self

Jonathan Haidt calls elevation: “The uplifting feeling triggered by witnessing moral beauty.” Games can evoke this not through speeches, but through systems of symbolism, color, rhythm, and silence.

GRIS never tells you what the protagonist feels. It lets you feel with her. Colors fade when she is broken. Movement constricts with fear. The world rebuilds itself as she heals. And then there is that moment when breath, color, and sound return. Not triumph, relief. A reminder that healing is not victory, but acceptance.

Hellblade doesn’t explain psychosis. It embodies it: voices whispering contradictory fears, visual distortions tightening the space around you, a world that feels like it is watching. One player said: “The music during his sacrifice still evokes sadness in me now.”

This is not understanding through information. It is understanding through experience.

The Neuroscience of Insight

When players experience insight whether through moral tension, empathy, or self-transcendence something very specific happens in the brain. It shifts into what neuroscientists call the default mode network (DMN), a constellation of regions including the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and hippocampus.

This network activates when we:

• reflect on who we are

• revisit important memories

• integrate emotions

• make sense of our actions

• consider what matters to us

Essentially, the DMN is the brain’s storytelling system, the part that turns experience into identity.

And here’s the fascinating part: Games activate this network more powerfully than passive media.

Why?

Because insight in games isn’t something you watch. It’s something you cause.

When you slay a creature that never hated you, or hurt someone you meant to protect, or inhabit the viewpoint of a character you thought you despised… You’re not just absorbing a narrative. You’re integrating an autobiographical event.

Your brain treats these moments as:

• your choices

• your consequences

• your emotional contradictions

The hippocampus stores them like memories. The medial PFC evaluates them against your values. The PCC links them into your sense of self.

This is why certain scenes linger for days, months, or years. Not because a game told you what to feel, but because your brain worked to understand itself through the experience. “Meaning is simply emotion woven into memory.” Joseph LeDoux

Moments of tension, resonance, and moral discomfort are processed as meaningful, not merely memorable. They activate networks involved in:

• autobiographical meaning-making

• emotional regulation

• moral reasoning

• self-evaluation

In other words: We transform gameplay into self-understanding because the brain is wired to integrate experience into identity. Insight isn’t a poetic metaphor. It’s a neural process.

And when a game gives us the right combination of agency, emotion, and consequence the brain treats play as lived experience.

Why This Matters for Designers

Game insight isn’t accidental. It emerges when certain design conditions quietly align:

• Emotional tension isn’t resolved too quickly

• Players must regulate their own discomfort

• The world responds like something alive

• Space, silence, is left for internal processing

• Mechanics support, rather than contradict, the emotional truth

As Bopp et al. (2016) found: “It wasn’t fun, but it stayed with me.” Insight is sticky. It lingers. It shapes memory.

And as Ryan & Deci (2001) write: “Human beings have an innate tendency toward growth and integration.”

Games tap into this instinct more naturally than any other medium, because they do not just tell us who we are. They let us discover it through action.

Insight Is Not a Genre, it’s a Lens

Insight doesn’t belong only to dramatic games or tragic narratives. It can live inside a crafting loop, a city builder, a companion moment, a single silent animation.

It appears whenever a game trusts players enough to let meaning form in the gaps in the tension, in the aftermath, in the breath between action and understanding.

Insight is where play stops being performance and becomes reflection. Where games stop being something we consume and become something that changes us.

I’d truly love to hear your own moments of insight in games.

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References

Aron, A., Aron, E. N., Tudor, M., & Nelson, G. (1991). Close relationships as self-expansion: Understanding the inclusion of other in the self

Bartsch, A., & Oliver, M. B. (2011). Making sense of entertainment: Eudaimonic appreciation as a central construct in the entertainment experience

Bopp, J. A., Opwis, K., & Mekler, E. D. (2016). “It wasn’t fun, it was meaningful”: Experiencing meaningful negative experiences in digital games

Andrews-Hanna, J. R. (2012). The brain’s default network and its adaptive role in internal mentation

Immordino-Yang, M. H., et al. (2009). Neural correlates of moral elevation

Spreng, R. N., & Grady, C. L. (2010). Patterns of brain activity supporting autobiographical memory, prospection, and theory of mind

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2001). An overview of self-determination theory: An organismic-dialectical perspective

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance

Haidt, J. (2000). The positive emotion of elevation

LeDoux, J. (2002). Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are

Oliver, M. B., & Raney, A. A. (2011). Development of the eudaimonic motivations for entertainment scale

Rosa, H. (2018). Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World

Tamborini, R., Bowman, N. D., Eden, A., Grizzard, M., & Organ, A. (2010–2011). Media entertainment and eudaimonia

Vorderer, P., & Reinecke, L. (2015). From mood to meaning: The importance of mixed affective experiences for entertainment psychology

SDT helps explain why play feels good, why challenge feels rewarding, why freedom motivates, why connection matters. Yet some games leave a mark that goes beyond satisfaction. They stay with us because they mean something. They don’t just fulfill our needs; they reframe how we see ourselves, or the world around us.

That kind of experience suggests there’s more to motivation than mastery, autonomy, or belonging. Something else is at work, a deeper drive toward understanding.

I call this missing dimension Insight.

The Hidden Drive: A Fourth Human Need?

Think of insight as the quiet light that appears after mastery: a subtle, reflective spark that follows action.

Through my work with neuroscientists and game designers, I’ve started wondering whether SDT might be missing something. What if there’s another need, one that explains why some play experiences transform us, not just entertain us?

I see Insight as the drive to make sense of experience, to connect action and emotion to values, identity, and meaning. It’s not about feeling free, skillful, or socially connected; it’s about understanding. It’s the moment when play becomes reflection, when we recognize something true about ourselves or the world through interaction.

As Waterman (1993) put it, “People are not only motivated to feel good, but also to experience a sense of meaning, coherence, and self-realization.

From Outcome to Motivation

This idea builds on work by Oliver et al. (2016), who found that players often describe meaningful games as those that provide “new insights about themselves or others.”
In their view, insight is an outcome of gameplay, part of what makes an experience emotionally powerful or “appreciated.”

I want to take that a step further. What if the motivation to seek insight is itself an intrinsic need, one that complements autonomy, competence, and relatedness?

In neuroscience, this aligns with findings on predictive processing and meaning-making networks (for example, the medial prefrontal cortex and the default mode network), which activate when people interpret experiences in relation to identity or values. This suggests a deep motivational drive for coherence and understanding.

Research on eudaimonic motivation (Huta & Waterman, 2014) further supports the idea that humans pursue activities for self-realization and personal meaning, beyond competence or relatedness.

That would mean players aren’t only driven to do (competence), choose (autonomy), or connect (relatedness), but also to understand, to make sense of emotion, consequence, and purpose through play.

A Hypothesis, Not a Doctrine

To be clear: this isn’t an attempt to rewrite SDT, but to extend it. Even Deci and Ryan describe integration, the process of bringing experiences into harmony with the self, as a natural aspect of growth. Insight could be the motivational lens for that integrative process: the need to align what we do with what we believe.

As Oliver & Bartsch (2010) describe, “Appreciation involves meaningful affective experiences that encourage reflection on human virtue, morality, and connectedness.”

Research since has supported this distinction:

• Autonomy and competence drive enjoyment: the sense of pleasure, mastery, and freedom.

• Relatedness and what I’d call insight drive appreciation: the sense of being moved, inspired, or morally engaged.

And as Huta & Ryan (2010) emphasize, “Hedonic and eudaimonic experiences are not opposites, but complementary forms of well-being.”

So, enjoyment keeps us engaged in the moment.
Appreciation keeps us engaged with life.
Together, they form the full spectrum of meaningful experience.

Why Insight Matters

Understanding this fourth need could also transform how we design: it might inspire slower pacing, more reflective reward systems, or narrative tones that invite pause rather than constant stimulation.

Insight transforms interaction into reflection. It’s the psychological bridge between doing and understanding, between achievement and alignment with one’s values.

Games can satisfy our basic needs for mastery, freedom, and connection, but they can also help us make sense of emotions and perspectives rarely explored in daily life.

Consider The Stanley Parable, which constantly confronts players with the illusion of choice, nudging them to reflect on authorship, agency, and the nature of freedom itself. Or This War of Mine, which asks players to survive wartime scarcity by stealing from others. Creating real moral tension that pushes them to examine their empathy and ethics. Likewise, Red Dead Redemption 2 connects insight to the world itself: the more players care for their horse or hunt responsibly, the more the world feels alive, a quiet dialogue about respect, responsibility, and loss.

Each of these moments turns play into contemplation. They meet the player not just as a participant, but as a person.

As Oliver & Raney (2011) note, “When entertainment helps people to reflect on what is truly important, it can contribute to a more profound sense of well-being.”

If autonomy lets players act, competence lets them achieve, and relatedness lets them connect, then insight lets them understand.

An Invitation

This idea is still a hypothesis, a conversation starter. But if it holds true, it could reshape how we think about engagement: from designing for satisfaction to designing for sense-making.

Games might not just meet our needs, they might help us discover what those needs truly are. And that, to me, is where play begins to touch purpose.

If insight truly belongs among our core needs, then the next frontier of game design isn’t more engagement: it’s more awareness.

Which game taught you something unexpected about yourself, others, or the world?”

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References

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior

• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

• Huta, V., & Waterman, A. S. (2014). Eudaimonia and its distinction from hedonia: Developing a classification and terminology for understanding well-being

• Oliver, M. B., & Raney, A. A. (2011). Entertainment as pleasurable and meaningful: Identifying hedonic and eudaimonic motivations for entertainment consumption

• Kounios, J., & Beeman, M. (2014). The Cognitive Neuroscience of Insight

• Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?

• Proulx, T., Inzlicht, M., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2012). Understanding all inconsistency compensation as a palliative response to violated expectations

• Bopp, J. A., Mekler, E. D., & Opwis, K. (2016). “Negative emotion, positive experience?” Emotionally moving moments in digital games

• Calleja, G. (2011). In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation

• Juul, J. (2013). The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games

• Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness

But I’ve often felt we talk about these ideas in isolation, as if they exist in neat boxes. In practice, they’re deeply intertwined. When one shifts, the others move too.

This article explores how these needs connect and why understanding their balance can change the way we design for motivation.

The Three Needs of Motivation

Self-Determination Theory (SDT), introduced by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, describes three fundamental psychological needs that drive intrinsic motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

When these needs are met, people feel self-directed, capable, and emotionally connected. They create engagement that lasts far beyond rewards or progression systems.

In games, these needs translate beautifully into design. Let’s look at how they truly feel in play.

Competence: The Joy of Mastery

Competence is the desire to feel effective and capable. It’s that moment when effort turns into mastery, when something once impossible suddenly feels effortless.

Few games capture this better than Celeste. Its platforming is brutally precise yet perfectly fair. Every fall is a lesson and every restart a test of resilience. When you finally clear that section that seemed out of reach, it feels deeply personal, not because the game praises you, but because you have changed.

That is competence: not dominance, but growth. Good design nurtures this by matching challenge and ability, allowing space to experiment, fail safely, and understand progress. When done right, improvement itself becomes the reward.

Autonomy: The Freedom to Choose with Meaning

Autonomy isn’t about doing whatever you want. It’s about feeling that your choices matter and reflect who you are.

In The Witcher 3, many quests end without a clear good outcome. You make decisions that carry emotional weight, not because of branching scripts, but because every path has a consequence.

Autonomy lives in that tension: the freedom to decide what kind of person you want to be.

But autonomy also lives outside of narrative. In Shadow of Mordor, the Nemesis system lets enemies remember you. Each encounter shapes future ones and the world responds to your actions. It’s not about visible options; it’s about being recognized by the system itself.

True autonomy is when a world acknowledges your presence and remembers your story.

Relatedness: The Quiet Power of Connection

Relatedness is our need to feel close to others, to belong, to be understood, to matter. It can be loud and social or quiet and deeply emotional.

Journey achieves this without a single word. You meet another anonymous player.

No usernames, no voice chat, no way to communicate beyond movement. And yet, when you help each other through a storm or share a moment of silence before the final ascent, a strange intimacy forms. When that companion disappears at the end, it feels like losing someone real.

That is connection at its purest form.

Even single-player games can reach it. The Last Guardian builds its emotional core entirely through the relationship between the boy and the creature, Trico. You don’t talk, you learn to trust. When Trico hesitates or protects you, it isn’t scripted affection; it feels earned through patience and care. The bond grows through shared experience, not exposition.

Design meets emotion when empathy becomes part of the interaction itself.

The Interdependence of the Three Needs

These three needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness are rarely experienced in isolation. They form what Deci and Ryan (2000) described as “a dynamic system of psychological nutriments”: each one feeds and strengthens the others.

When one is fulfilled, it supports the growth of the others.

When one is neglected, the entire motivational system weakens.

A player who feels competent is more confident to act autonomously. A sense of autonomy deepens emotional investment, which makes relatedness more meaningful. Together, they create a loop of agency, mastery, and connection - a motivational ecosystem rather than a checklist.

You can feel this interdependence in Hollow Knight. Its progression is built on competence, tough encounters that demand patience and learning, but it’s autonomy that keeps you exploring. You are never told where to go; curiosity itself becomes your compass. As you venture deeper, the world’s quiet melancholy and the faint traces of past travelers spark a subtle feeling of relatedness: You care not just about winning, but about what this place once was. The satisfaction of skill, freedom, and empathy merge into one sensation: belonging through mastery.

Or consider Animal Crossing. It has almost no challenge curve, but autonomy and relatedness are deeply entwined. The freedom to design, decorate, and interact at your own pace creates a sense of competence that is emotional rather than mechanical, a feeling of being capable of shaping a world that responds gently to your presence.

As Rigby and Ryan (2011) noted, “When autonomy, competence, and relatedness are simultaneously supported, play becomes self-sustaining. The activity itself is the reward.” That’s why some games don’t need constant external incentives; the motivation arises from the alignment of these three psychological forces.

But when one breaks, the whole system trembles. A confusing UI can shatter competence by making control feel clumsy. A “choice” that leads to the same outcome can hollow out autonomy. A disconnected world, where NPCs don’t react, or systems don’t acknowledge you, can erode relatedness.

Good design doesn’t maximize each need independently. It creates harmony between them.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a near-perfect example of that balance. Every new skill you learn (competence) opens more meaningful ways to interact with the world (autonomy). The small environmental details, like villagers recognizing your actions or the gentle care for your horse, reinforce a quiet, emotional bond with the world (relatedness). Each mechanic amplifies the others until they feel inseparable.

In the end, motivation isn’t just about doing more, it’s about feeling aligned.

As players, we are most engaged when challenge feels fair, freedom feels real, and the world feels alive enough to matter.

Beyond the Three

Over the years, I’ve found that even when all three needs are met, when players feel capable, free, and connected, some games still linger longer than others. Certain experiences don’t just engage us; they change us. They leave us thoughtful, unsettled, or quietly inspired.

Maybe there is something more, a deeper layer beneath satisfaction and flow. A reason why some moments in play stay with us long after the controller is set down.

But that is a story for next time. :)

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References

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior

• Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2008). Facilitating optimal motivation and psychological well-being across life’s domains

• Przybylski, A. K., Rigby, C. S., & Ryan, R. M. (2010). A motivational model of video game engagement

• Rigby, S., & Ryan, R. (2011). Glued to Games: How Video Games Draw Us In and Hold Us Spellbound

• Tamborini, R., Bowman, N. D., Eden, A., Grizzard, M., & Organ, A. (2010). Defining media enjoyment as the satisfaction of intrinsic needs

• Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation

• Huta, V., & Ryan, R. M. (2010). Pursuing pleasure or virtue: The differential and overlapping well-being benefits of hedonic and eudaimonic motives

Meaning in games does not always come from story or spectacle. Sometimes, it arises in small, deliberate choices: the rhythm of an action, the consequence of a decision, the hesitation before pressing a button. It is in those quiet spaces where play becomes thought.

A meaningful experience gives players the chance to confront or contemplate something beyond the system itself, such as the value of virtue, the fragility of compassion, or the moral weight of their own choices.

These moments often emerge through three pathways:

• Socially conscious content

• Personal value reflection

• Morally challenging interactions

Let’s look at how mechanics and systems can turn interaction into insight.

Moral Ambiguity and Complex Choices

What happens when a rule forces you to betray your values?

Games like Papers, Please and Frostpunk ask that question not through dialogue but through design.

In Papers, Please every decision at the immigration desk begins as simple procedure. You learn the rules, match the stamps, scan the faces. The system rewards accuracy and speed. At first, it feels good to improve, to keep your line moving, to earn enough credits so your family survives another day.

But then something shifts. The routine becomes automatic, mechanical. You start approving or denying people without really seeing them — until one day a face stays with you. A husband passes inspection, but his wife’s papers are incomplete. The rules say she must be turned away. You know what will happen to her if you follow protocol.

That is the moment the system turns against you. You realize it has trained you to value efficiency over empathy. You’ve become part of the machinery that breaks the very people you meant to help. The game doesn’t punish you for being cruel; it simply lets you live with the weight of it.

In that silence between stamping the passport and watching the couple separate, bureaucracy becomes emotional labor. The procedure that once felt like mastery now feels like complicity.

Frostpunk extends this dilemma into a philosophy of survival. As the leader of a frozen city, every decision becomes a test of your own humanity. You begin with good intentions — to protect, to rebuild, to give people hope. But as the temperature falls, morality starts to crack.

You are forced into choices that no longer feel like choices. Do you send children to work so the city can survive another day, or preserve their innocence and watch everyone starve? Do you rule through faith or order, compassion or control? There are no right answers, only trade-offs measured in lives and warmth.

The game feels like the trolley problem turned into a city builder. Every policy saves someone at the cost of someone else. You watch your own principles erode under frostbite and necessity until survival itself becomes both victory and failure.

Frostpunk doesn’t ask what kind of city you can build. It asks what kind of person you become when the world demands impossible decisions.

These games do not tell you what is moral. They make you feel the discomfort of choosing. As Oliver and Bartsch (2011) observed, this tension, being moved and unsettled at once, often leads to appreciation: a reflective form of enjoyment where meaning lingers after play ends.

Social Dilemmas and Multiplayer Morality

Morality can also emerge where systems meet other players.

In DayZ, hesitation becomes part of the design. You see another survivor. Do you help, or protect yourself? Every interaction becomes a fragile experiment in trust.

Sea of Thieves builds on the same principle. Every ship on the horizon could be friend or foe. The game never defines what is right; it lets players write their own ethics through behavior. Over time, communities form unspoken codes of honor, betrayal, or restraint. Ambiguity itself becomes a mechanic, a space where morality is negotiated, not scripted.

These encounters echo what sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2018) described as resonance: a moment when we do not just act on the world but are touched by it, changed through connection.

In multiplayer systems like these, meaning comes from the fragile dance between trust and fear, generosity and self-preservation.

Emotion Through Mechanics

Not all emotion needs words.

Some games make us feel through the way we play.

In Florence, there are no dialogues, yet you understand an entire relationship simply through the way its puzzles are built. At first, the pieces slide together easily, quick and light, like the rhythm of falling in love. Every interaction feels effortless.

But as the relationship begins to fade, something subtle changes. The puzzle pieces drift apart, just a little farther each time. You start dragging them faster, trying to hold the it together, to keep the rhythm that once felt natural. Yet no matter how quickly you move, the fragments keep slipping away.

It is such a simple mechanic, yet it captures something painfully real: that moment when connection turns into effort, when love becomes maintenance. You don’t need words to understand it. Your hands already feel what your heart knows: you’re trying to fix something that’s already breaking.

In Journey, two silent travelers move through a shifting landscape. There is no chat, no identity, no goal beyond movement itself. Yet when your companion quietly disappears, the loss feels startlingly real.

Emotion lives in the design, not just in the story. The weight of a button, the rhythm of motion, the moment a mechanic breaks its own pattern, all of these can speak as powerfully as dialogue.

Interaction becomes language. Play becomes empathy.

Systems That Teach Empathy

Even open-world systems can carry moral insight.

In Red Dead Redemption 2, the quality of harvested materials depends on how ethically the player treats animals. The system quietly connects care to competence, compassion to reward. Over time, players learn empathy not through story but through repetition, behavior shaping belief.

When we designed at Ubisoft the crafting system for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, we faced a similar challenge. Early prototypes were full of recipes and parts, complex but not meaningful. We shifted the focus from management to discovery. Players could freely combine materials, seeing each choice reflected both in the item’s stats and in its appearance. A green leaf tinted a bow, rare ingredients changed its texture, and weather conditions shaped its outcome. Instead of following instructions on UI, players could experiment and learn through feedback and own choices.

Crafting turned from production into exploration, nurturing autonomy, competence, and relatedness, the three psychological needs defined in Self-Determination Theory.

When systems align with human motivation, they do more than entertain. They teach empathy, mastery, and identity through play itself.

Games as Lived Lessons

Sometimes, meaning is not abstract but directly embodied.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice weaves its portrayal of psychosis directly into how you play. The world itself becomes unstable — shadows whisper, light distorts, and the voices begin. They come from every direction, soft and insistent, contradicting each other, telling you what to do, what not to do, what to fear.

At first, you try to ignore them. Then you realize you can’t. Their presence seeps into every moment, every step. You start second-guessing your own perception, just as Senua does.

You are not watching her descent; you are inside it. The boundaries between clarity and confusion blur until you begin to feel the exhaustion, the fear, and the isolation of her world. The game never asks you to understand psychosis, it lets you feel what it might be like to live with it.

Awareness becomes understanding, and understanding becomes empathy.

When Play Becomes Purpose

All these examples share one quality: they invite reflection. They turn action into thought and thought into feeling. That moment of reflection, when a player pauses and senses something more, is the essence of Eudaimonic UX.

It is when play begins to speak back to us, when interaction becomes insight.

As Mary Beth Oliver and Anne Bartsch (2010) describe, “Meaningful entertainment experiences are characterized by feelings of elevation, inspiration, and self-reflection, where individuals are moved and cognitively engaged with questions of purpose and morality.”

Eudaimonia begins when play does not just entertain; it transforms.

Two Systems of Engagement

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow offers a useful lens here.

System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional, the domain of hedonic play.

System 2 is slower, deliberate, and reflective, the space of meaning.

Media psychologist R. Vittersø (2016) suggested that hedonic happiness belongs to System 1, while eudaimonic happiness engages both: the quick joy of the moment and the slower satisfaction of growth.

That is why we can love both Mario Kart and Life is Strange. Pleasure and meaning are not opposites but partners. Together, they create the full arc of human experience: instinctive play and reflective purpose.

Where Fun Meets Meaning

Eudaimonic UX does not replace fun; it deepens it.

When we design for both pleasure and purpose, we create games that stay with players long after they put down the controller.

Today’s players seek that blend, experiences that are not only enjoyable but transformative. They want to feel that what they do in a game matters, that it reflects something true about themselves and their world.

Meaningful play is not about telling grand stories. It is about designing for resonance, the quiet alignment of action, reflection, and emotion that turns gameplay into memory.

What game made you feel that kind of resonance, when the system, story, and emotion suddenly clicked into one unforgettable experience?

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When we look at games like The Division, Rocket League, Assassin’s Creed, or Mario Kart, it’s easy to focus on how different they are, from mechanics to tone to narrative. Yet they all share one fundamental trait: they’re designed for immediate engagement and low cognitive conflict.

These are experiences that are easy to process, emotionally and mentally, and that deliver quick pleasure through mastery, collaboration, or competition. This type of experience is what we call Hedonic UX. It centers on enjoyment, relaxation, and mood regulation — a temporary sense of fun and freedom.

Theories like Mood Management Theory (Zillmann, 1988) and Disposition Theory (Raney, 2003; Zillmann & Cantor, 1977) explain why players often prefer light-hearted entertainment that avoids negative emotions. It satisfies short-term needs for pleasure, control, and escape.

But this doesn’t explain why so many of us are drawn to games and stories that make us uncomfortable. Why we find joy in tragedy, horror, or emotional conflict. Why we cry in The Last of Us and yet call it one of our favorite experiences.

The Paradox of “Sad Fun”

Researchers have explored this paradox for decades. Newer work in positive media psychology suggests that we also seek out meaningful experiences that evoke mixed emotions: sadness, awe, hope, even moral conflict, … because they fulfill deeper psychological needs.

These experiences elicit what psychologists call elevation or appreciation: the feeling of being moved, inspired, or morally uplifted (Oliver & Bartsch, 2011; Oliver et al., 2018).

They often involve themes of virtue, self-understanding, and moral complexity - things that help us make sense of our emotions and our place in the world.

As sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2018) describes in his Theory of Resonance, meaningful experiences emerge from a “dual movement of affection and emotion”, something external touches us, and we respond by forming a connection. In that exchange, we feel alive.

Enter Eudaimonic UX

This brings us to the other end of the engagement spectrum: Eudaimonic UX.

Where hedonia is about feeling good, eudaimonia is about being good: aligning with purpose, authenticity, and self-realization (Waterman et al., 2010).

Eudaimonic experiences engage both cognitive and emotional systems. They challenge us, provoke thought, and connect us to others. According to Peter Vorderer’s Two-Level Model of Entertainment Motivation (2011), hedonic and eudaimonic gratifications are not opposites but complementary. We can have fun and meaning simultaneously.

Media scholars such as Oliver and Bartsch (2011) and Tamborini et al. (2010) show that eudaimonic experiences trigger reflection, moral reasoning, and empathy, supporting personal growth and even prosocial behavior.

Happiness derived from meaning, not just pleasure, tends to be more stable and long-lasting (Huta & Ryan, 2010; Fredrickson et al., 2015). These experiences linger; they stay with us long after the controller is put down.

Think of Papers, Please, Life is Strange, The Walking Dead, or Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. These games mix positive and negative affect, forcing us to reflect on our values, ethics, and identity. They’re not “fun” in a traditional sense, but they’re deeply fulfilling.

What resonates with you? I’d love to hear your thoughts, stories, or favorite examples of meaningful play.

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I believe emotions are the heart of engagement, they turn interaction into connection, and moments into memories. Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by psychology and driven by the wish to understand human behavior: what moves people, what motivates them, and what makes experiences truly meaningful.

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with neuroscientists to explore how science can enrich design. Together, we built workshops on motivation, emotion, and learning. translating research into creative tools for game design. It was the happiest, most fulfilling time of my career.

When that work ended, I gradually stopped reading science. Not because I lost interest, but because the context, the “why”, was gone. I realized that what I missed wasn’t just the research itself, but the sense of purpose that came from connecting science with creativity and watching others light up when design and psychology clicked.

So I’m starting this newsletter, Meaningful Gameplay.

It’s my way of returning to what made me fall in love with design in the first place: understanding people, their minds, motivations, and emotions and building experiences that truly resonate.

Here, I’ll explore how insights from neuroscience and psychology can help us design games that don’t just entertain, but connect. Games that care about emotion, immersion, and meaning.

If you’re curious about making games more human, whether through motivation, accessibility, or emotional design: welcome. You’ll feel at home here.