#gameimmersion

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

Sources and Significance – Blog 4

This post looks at how The Last of Us Part II builds realism through experience, emotion, and player involvement, rather than depending on visual accuracy alone.

Realism Beyond Visual Detail

People often talk about the game’s graphical detail, but the realism that sticks with me comes from how it feels to play. The design leans on pacing, interaction, and emotional weight, so believability is produced through presence rather than through photorealism. In that sense, realism isn’t a single aesthetic goal; it’s a set of strategies that make a world and its actions feel grounded.

Experiential Realism and Player Embodiment

A big part of this is experiential realism. Combat feels heavy and uncomfortable, and it demands slow, deliberate choices. Violence isn’t staged as heroic or stylish; it’s tiring and often followed by quiet. Those pauses matter because they stop the player from skating over consequences. You’re not only witnessing brutality you’re carrying out actions and then sitting in the aftermath, which makes realism operate through the body, not just through representation.

Believability and Emotional Restraint

The game also avoids spectacle in its emotional tone. Characters react in ways that feel shaped by trauma and fear, not by neat dramatic beats. Long silences, minimal dialogue, and restrained music give space for reflection instead of constantly pushing emotion at the player. That restraint suggests realism can be psychological and affective more about emotional truth than factual accuracy.

Simulation and Player Responsibility

If I think in terms of representation versus simulation, Part II sits closer to simulation. Film can show violence at a distance, but the game places you inside it. You have to move, act, choose, and survive, then deal with what follows. That participation creates a kind of responsibility that passive viewing can’t replicate, and it’s one of the clearest ways the game produces realism.

Discomfort as a Realist Strategy

Finally, discomfort is used deliberately. The game often refuses clean rewards or heroic closure, which challenges the idea that immersion should always be pleasurable. Instead, realism becomes confrontational: the player is kept inside morally messy situations long enough for them to register emotionally.

Conclusion

Overall, The Last of Us Part II shows how realism in games can come from experiential design, emotional restraint, and simulation. Visual detail matters, but the deeper realism is produced through interaction and affect through what the player has to do, endure, and sit with showing how contemporary games can redefine what “real” even means.

References