Aug 2026· Communications in Humanities Research· Vol 115, pp. 14-18· 0 citations
Abstract
Game music does far more than fill silence; it shapes how players feel, pay attention, and make choices. This paper examines game music as an emotional operating system that guides bodily arousal, cognitive focus, and narrative interpretation during play. Drawing on the valence–arousal model of emotion, studies on horror audio progression, research on peaceful and powerful music, and work on energetic soundtracks, the paper argues that musical cues influence players through more than tempo or volume. Game music can raise tension, support immersion, increase risk-taking, or overload performance depending on how it interacts with genre, task demand, and player experience. The paper proposes a three-layer model of game music emotion: a bodily layer involving heart rate and tension, a cognitive layer involving attention and decision-making, and a narrative layer involving meaning and memory.
This paper reviews emotion-aware adaptive game design. It explains how games detecting player feelings can outperform traditional difficulty adjustment, which only tweaks numbers like health or damage. While such tweaks boost performance, they rarely reduce negative emotions or improve immersion. Affective computing no...
Jia-Kang Lu· Communications in Humanities...· 0 citations
Digital games provide diverse experiential structures that may influence players’ psychological experiences and emotional functioning. While previous studies have frequently examined multiplayer interaction in relation to social well-being and motivation, less attention has been given to how different single-player gam...
Suomiya Bao· 2026 International Conferenc...· 0 citations
Abstract Music evokes strong emotions across listeners although it conveys no biologically relevant information regarding the survival challenges in the environment. Here we review the neurobiology and psychology of emotional communication through music, focussing on the functions and mechanisms of musical emotional ex...
V. Putkinen, Maya Rassouli, L. Nummenmaa· Philosophical transactions o...· 1 citation
Perceiving and feeling emotion from nonverbal signals (e.g., facial expressions) is a considerable part of human social interactions. A common approach to studying such nonverbal interactions is to use music for auditory cues and dance for embodied gestures, given their capacity to communicate emotions. Yet most invest...
M. Susino, Manuel Anglada-Tort, S. Saarikallio et al.· Music Perception: An Interdi...· 0 citations
Adaptive games are often evaluated through performance alone, even though gameplay experience also depends on players’ affective responses. We present an affect-aware game adaptation approach that combines a control loop architecture with tabular model-free reinforcement learning (MFRL) to adjust discrete game and user...
Mahyar Tourchi Moghaddam, Tiziano Santilli, M. Alipour· Proceedings of the 28th Inte...· 0 citations
This paper examines how artistic creativity, as one mode of PLAY, enables both artists and respondents/audiences to express and integrate diverse emotional operating systems. Through the theoretical framework of affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, complemented by psychoanalytic perspectives, the manuscript analyzes...
Dorit Noy-Sharav· Journal of Psychology and Ne...· 0 citations
We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads.
See our Cookie Policy.
