#affecttheory

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Sources and Significance – Blog 8

This post looks at how Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice creates an embodied emotional experience through affective design, focusing on sensation, immersion, and player perception rather than narrative alone.

Affective Design in Games

Hellblade treats emotion as something you feel physically, not just something the story tells you to understand. Instead of leaning on exposition, it uses sound, movement, camera distance, and control to generate intensity. That connects to a wider shift in media studies away from representation as the main focus, and toward how media produces sensation, atmosphere, and bodily response.

Affect and Emotion

A key distinction in this session is between emotion and affect. Emotions are feelings we can usually name fear, sadness, anger while affect refers to pre-conscious sensations like tension, unease, and discomfort (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010). Hellblade hits you at that affective level first. Before I can clearly label what I’m experiencing, the game builds pressure through whispering voices, warped audio, and moments where vision and certainty are limited. The point isn’t immediate “meaning”; it’s intensity.

Sound and Sensory Pressure

Sound design is the engine of that intensity. Binaural audio makes voices feel uncomfortably close, as if they’re inside your head rather than in the environment. Those voices don’t just deliver narrative information they interfere with play. They create doubt, urgency, and fear, pulling your attention and shaping how you behave. It’s a strong reminder that affect in games can function as a force that directs action, not just a layer of representation.

Embodiment and Discomfort

The game also uses the body to create discomfort. The camera stays tight to Senua, narrowing your field of vision and making spaces feel claustrophobic. Combat is slow and heavy, producing fatigue instead of empowerment. These choices make experience itself part of the meaning: realism and emotional truth come from what it feels like to move through the world, not from visual accuracy or clean narrative clarity.

Ethics of Emotional Engagement

Hellblade also raises an ethical question about affective design. By putting the player in a vulnerable position, it invites empathy, but it also manages attention through discomfort. Ash argues that games organise affect to guide player responses, turning emotion into a form of engagement and control (Ash, 2015). In Hellblade, that organisation pulls you closer to Senua while also asking you to endure the experience rather than escape it.

Conclusion

Overall, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice shows how games can operate as powerful affective systems. Through sound, embodiment, and sensory pressure, it produces emotion that is often felt before it’s understood. It’s a clear example of how contemporary games can move beyond representation and engage players at the level of affect, making feeling central to meaning and experience.

References

Affect and Emotions in Digital Media

Figure 1: Call of Duty

Affect theory deals with felt, and sometimes sub-conscious, forces at work in individual and group dynamics. Affect is not only the affective but functionality of bodies through which they impact and are impacted upon. Affect is different from emotions because it is relational, dynamic, and not necessarily representable in worlds of language or for bodies. As this paper has demonstrated affect is important for engaging audiences and communicating across digital media beyond narrative. First-person-shooter computer games such as Call of Duty 4, therefore, require affective involvement. The game designer states that through pursuing an emotional bond with the game the player becomes immersed. A moral body is produced by sensitizing the bodily feelings of the players, so as to produce a set of feeling rules – from being frightened to thrilled – that explains how the archetypal sportsman operates inside the game. In the same ways as character formation is long-term, so is the RPG player’s relation to a game world, for example in Final Fantasy VII.

Figure 2: Emotional Engagement in Animation - Elephants Dream

In the same manner, affect is also central to animation in instances it generates passionate and strong effects. For example, the movie, Elephants Dream (2006), emphasizes distorted, concentrated sterner instead of a story telling. They do not display any plot hierarchization and make an emotionally notable viewer’s experience valued more than a narrative. Digital media use, known as ‘affect to’ professes that emotion is not just a reaction, but a tool to engage the audience deeply into the content material (Steinert & Dennis, 2022).

References:

Activision. (n.d.). Call of Duty Official Website. Retrieved from https://www.callofduty.com/.

Blender Studio. (2006). Elephants Dream. Official Website. Retrieved from https://studio.blender.org/projects/elephants-dream/?asset=1069.

It’s possible to resonate in other frequency than pre-set? Should we? Our aim is to find humility to co-create from a gray space, not a full light where we are detected. This is the response of the body.

I am captured, not by something I see but by something I hear. 

I’ve enter a room where a piercing high-pitched sound hangs in the air, quiet yet impossible to ignore. 

I turn to the source and see an old television with a peculiar screen, taller than it is wide. 

A single vertical beam of blueish white cathode ray light falling down the centre of an otherwise blank screen.

The piece is Nam June Paik’s Zen for TV. 

It seems to have captured the attention of everyone in the room, despite its being surrounded by other artworks, many of them far more elaborate and complex. 

Captured is the right word: my attention feels coerced. 

That once ubiquitous ringing sound screams out that something is not working as it should be. 

But this is a gallery. 

However things are is how they should be. 

I am prevented from interpreting what I encounter as malfunctioning, despite having encountered it in the mode of repair. 

Unable to act, the signification falls away. 

All that's left is sound as sound, non-image as non-image.

I began to reflect on this experience, which occurred over a year ago now, after being reminded of it by something said on a panel at Transmediale last weekend (the panel was titled Computation and Affect: Hard Feelings). I forget who said it, but it went something like: ‘affect’ refers to feelings, sensations or emotions before you can give them a word. That is, prior to their being identified under a conceptual scheme or situated in a narrative.

At the time I wondered whether the ‘priority’ referred to is a conceptual or temporal priority, though now I’ve thought about it more the distinction feels unclear. These thoughts brought to mind Nam June Paik, and on further reflection I came to reckon these ideas can help to understand Zen for TV. (Or perhaps Zen for TV can help me understand affect theory. Either is welcome.)

The associations of the piercing sound provoke a movement of affect, an orientation to act experienced as a kind of unspecified discomfort. There is a change in intensities, to use a Deleuzian term, which initiates a process (as do all intensive gradients, Deleuze tells us). There is a desire to seek and categorise, to locate the causal source of the discomfort, identify it and act upon it. All this is set in motion prior to any possibility of describing it.

The trajectory is common to all encounters with malfunctioning technology. What is supposed to remain in the background suddenly intrudes into consciousness, forcing us into a temporary role as an engineer-bureaucrat until it can be fixed and allowed to fade away.