Chapter 15 Exercises: Emotion and Empathy

These exercises mix analytical work (studying games that produce emotion), design work (imagining emotional systems on paper), and implementation work (building narrative triggers in your prototype). The mix is deliberate: emotional design is not only a technical skill but an analytical one, and you will grow fastest by doing both.

Budget roughly 10 to 14 hours across the whole set. Some analytical exercises are short (30 minutes); the implementation exercises and the final project may take entire evenings.

Exercise 1: The Borrowed-vs-Interactive Emotion Audit (Analysis, 45-60 minutes)

Pick a game you have played that produced a strong emotional response in you — sad, joyful, frightening, proud, guilty, whatever. Write down the specific scene or moment.

Now apply the test from Section 15.1. Ask: if the game had simply shown you a cutscene of what happened, without your interactive participation, would the emotion have been equivalent?

For each of these categories, rate the moment:

  • Borrowed emotion: The feeling arose from performance (acting, music, cinematography). An equivalent film scene would have produced an equivalent feeling.
  • Interactive emotion: The feeling arose from your mechanical participation — you did the thing, the feeling was about what you did.
  • Mixed: Both contributed in roughly equal measure.

Most "iconic" game moments, on careful analysis, turn out to be borrowed emotion with a mechanical frame. Be honest with yourself. The analytic value is in distinguishing the two.

Write up (400-600 words) your analysis. If the moment was primarily borrowed, identify what mechanical changes could have shifted it toward interactive. If it was primarily interactive, identify exactly which mechanical system produced the feeling.

If you cannot think of a candidate moment, consider the opening of The Last of Us (largely borrowed), the ending of Journey (largely interactive), or the cake-is-a-lie reveal in Portal (largely interactive). Each produces emotion through different means. A useful variation on the exercise: choose three moments of your own, one from each of these three categories, and compare the textures of the emotions they produced. Interactive emotion feels different in the body from borrowed emotion — it is slower to dissipate, harder to describe, and often accompanied by a sense of implication or ownership that borrowed emotion does not produce. Noticing this difference in your own responses is itself a useful exercise for sharpening your emotional-design instincts.

Exercise 2: Identify the Dominant Aesthetics (Analysis, 30 minutes)

Pick three games — not randomly, but one you consider emotionally powerful, one you consider mechanically tight but emotionally flat, and one you personally love without being able to articulate why.

For each game, identify the two or three dominant LeBlanc aesthetics (from the list in Section 15.3: sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery, expression, submission).

Now ask: do the three games' aesthetics differ? Your answer will tell you which aesthetics you personally respond to. This is critical self-knowledge for a designer — you tend to design for aesthetics that move you, and you tend to undervalue aesthetics that do not. Audit the aesthetics of your own prototype: do they match the games you love, or have you inherited default aesthetics from the genre you are working in?

Write 200-400 words.

Exercise 3: Map a Ludonarrative Dissonance (Analysis, 30-45 minutes)

Pick an action game with a charming protagonist (Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Horizon Zero Dawn, or any similar). Count, approximately, the number of humans or human-equivalent enemies your character kills over the course of the game. Now read the game's dialogue, noting how the protagonist describes themselves.

Write a short paper (300-500 words) describing the dissonance. Be specific: quote a line of dialogue in which the protagonist is presented as decent or heroic, and contrast it with the mechanical reality of their killing. Then ask: does the game acknowledge this dissonance anywhere? Does any character call the protagonist out? Does the game's ending reflect the weight of the killing?

The exercise is not intended as a moral critique of these games — they are fun to play — but as an exercise in noticing a design pattern that has become invisible through ubiquity.

Exercise 4: Design a System That Produces Sadness (Design, 60-90 minutes)

Sadness is harder to design mechanically than fear or excitement. For this exercise, design — on paper — a mechanical system for your prototype (or for a hypothetical game) that produces sadness in the player through its operation, not through cutscenes.

The system must:

  1. Involve at least one NPC or named game object.
  2. Produce its emotional effect through something the player does, not something the player watches.
  3. Be unavoidable — the player cannot opt out of the emotional beat.
  4. Not announce itself as a sad moment.

Describe the system in one page. Include:

  • The setup: what does the player do before the emotional beat? What relationship or investment have they built?
  • The trigger: what exact mechanical event produces the shift?
  • The aftermath: what changes about the game after the event, and how long does the change persist?
  • The test: how would you know the system worked? What behavioral signal would a playtester exhibit?

Good examples to reference: the Aeris moment in Final Fantasy VII (loss of a party member you had grown attached to mechanically), the silence after a character death in This War of Mine, the empty chair in Spiritfarer.

Extension: after you have designed the sadness system, write a second version of the same system that produces, instead, the quieter emotion of melancholy. Sadness is acute; melancholy is ambient. Sadness has a trigger point; melancholy has a tone that pervades the scene. The mechanical design of a melancholy system is different — it is less about single events and more about rhythms, returns, and absences. The design of both helps you calibrate the range of the sad register.

Exercise 5: Implement the NarrativeTrigger (Implementation, 60-90 minutes)

In your prototype, implement the NarrativeTrigger.gd pattern from Section 15.4. Do not yet design the emotional moment — just build the infrastructure.

Tasks:

  1. Create NarrativeTrigger.gd as an Area2D (or Area3D) that coordinates three subsystems: music, lighting, and NPC state.
  2. Create MusicDirector.gd (or equivalent) as a singleton/autoload that can cross-fade between music tracks.
  3. Create LightingDirector.gd that can blend the global ambient color over time.
  4. Create NPCDirector.gd that can receive state-change messages and route them to specific NPCs.
  5. Test the infrastructure by placing a single trigger, walking through it, and verifying all three subsystems respond.

You do not need to make the trigger emotionally meaningful yet. You are building the plumbing. Verify it works.

Exercise 6: Write an Emotional Moment Scene (Design/Writing, 45-60 minutes)

Pick one of the candidate moments from Section 15.12 (loss, reveal, sacrifice, or wonder). Write a one-to-two page design document for that moment in your prototype, including:

  • Setup (mechanical history): What has the player done in the hours before this moment that makes it land?
  • Trigger conditions: What must be true for the moment to fire? Is it optional or inevitable?
  • The moment itself: What happens in the subsystems — music, lighting, NPC behavior, environment — over what duration?
  • The aftermath: What has changed about the game world after the moment? Does the change persist?
  • The intended emotional target: Name the specific emotion. Do not use generic words like "sad" or "happy"; be specific ("the particular ache of realizing you cannot go back").

The design document should read like a small short story about what the player experiences, but from the outside — describing their actions and the systems' responses, not their internal feelings.

Exercise 7: Implement Your Emotional Moment (Implementation, 2-3 hours)

Implement the moment you designed in Exercise 6. Use the NarrativeTrigger infrastructure from Exercise 5.

Tasks:

  1. Place the trigger at the correct location in your prototype.
  2. Configure the music cue, lighting shift, and NPC state change for the emotional target.
  3. If your design involves persistent world state changes (an NPC missing, an item removed, a door closed), implement those changes.
  4. Playtest with yourself first. Does the moment register for you?
  5. Iterate — most emotional moments require at least three passes to tune correctly. The most common problems are: the music shift is too abrupt, the lighting shift is too subtle, or the setup was too weak to make the moment land.

Exercise 8: Playtest for Emotional Effect (Observation, 60-90 minutes)

Recruit two playtesters who have not seen your prototype. Watch them play through the emotional moment. Do not narrate. Do not prepare them for the moment. Do not ask them to pay attention to anything specific.

Record:

  • Their facial expressions at the moment of trigger (if visible).
  • Their input behavior in the minute following the trigger. Did they pause? Did they continue playing as normal? Did they go back to check something?
  • Their verbal reactions, if any.
  • After they finish, ask them (without leading): "Was there a moment in that playthrough that stood out to you emotionally?"

If they identify your intended moment, the system worked. If they identify a different moment as the emotional one, ask why. If they identify no moment, the system is not working and needs another pass.

Write a short playtest report (300-500 words) summarizing what you observed and what you will change.

Most designers are disappointed by their first playtests of emotional moments. The emotion they felt designing it does not transfer. This is normal. Iteration is not just permitted; it is expected. Professional emotional design typically takes 5-10 iterations per moment. Keep a playtest log across iterations — what you changed, what the next playtester experienced, and what the difference suggests about the underlying system. The log is more valuable than any single iteration; it is the record of your developing intuition about what works in the specific registers of your game.

A note on observation: the most valuable data in an emotional playtest is often the absence of reaction you expected. If the playtester continues playing without pause, the moment did not register. If they pause but their face does not change, the moment registered as curious rather than emotional. If their posture shifts — sitting back, leaning forward, going still — something landed. Train yourself to read bodies, not just faces.

Exercise 9: Analyze Emotional Pacing in a Favorite Game (Analysis, 45-60 minutes)

Pick a game you have completed recently. On a horizontal timeline, plot the emotional intensity of each of its major sequences on a 1-10 scale. Be honest — most games are more uneven than you remember.

Now examine the shape of the curve. Do peaks alternate with valleys? Are there long plateaus of high intensity that caused you to disengage? Are there long plateaus of low intensity that caused you to wonder if the game was ever going to go anywhere?

Identify the two or three moments of highest emotional intensity in the game. Look at what happens immediately before those moments. Is there a breathing-room sequence? Is the preceding content deliberately lower-intensity to set up the peak?

Write up your analysis (400-600 words) with annotations on the curve. Apply the lessons to your own prototype: where are your peaks, and where is your breathing room?

Exercise 10: The Cozy Design Challenge (Design, 60-90 minutes)

This exercise is a discipline check. Design — on paper — a ten-minute sequence for your prototype that produces contentment in the player. No tension. No threat. No loss. No puzzles hard enough to produce frustration.

You may find this surprisingly difficult. The instinct, in games, is always to add stakes. This exercise forbids them.

Design constraints:

  • The player must have meaningful things to do.
  • Nothing bad can happen.
  • The player must feel that the time was not wasted.
  • At the end of the ten minutes, the player should feel calmer than when they started.

Write a one-page design for the sequence. The exercise is valuable because it forces you to think about engagement without stakes — a skill that your prototype may not currently require, but that will enrich any game you design in the future.

Exercise 11: The Comedy Timing Experiment (Design/Implementation, 60-90 minutes)

If your prototype supports it, add one comedic beat to the game. The comedic beat must:

  • Be triggered by player action, not by a timer or a cutscene.
  • Involve a setup (from the player) and a payoff (from the game).
  • Not rely on pre-recorded voice acting — text and audio samples only.

Playtest the beat with two people. Did they laugh? If not, diagnose. Most likely problems: the setup was too long, the payoff arrived too late, the payoff assumed knowledge the player did not have, or the joke depended on tone that the prototype does not yet establish.

Write a short reflection (200-400 words) on what you learned about comedic timing in interactive media.

Exercise 12: The Empathy Mechanic Brainstorm (Design, 30-45 minutes)

Choose one specific kind of person whose experience you want the player to understand better: a refugee, a caregiver, a worker in a specific industry, someone living with a specific condition, someone of a different cultural background from most players.

Brainstorm five mechanics — not narratives, mechanics — that would produce an element of their experience in the player.

Examples for reference:

  • Papers, Please puts the player in the bureaucrat's seat; the mechanic of the stamp is the mechanic of the job.
  • Hellblade puts the player in the hearing-voices experience; the mechanic is the ambient voice mix.
  • Spiritfarer puts the player in the caregiver's role; the mechanic is the cooking, the listening, the goodbyes.

For each of your five mechanics, write a single paragraph describing how the mechanic works and what specific aspect of the experience it captures. Resist the urge to describe the mechanic as a narrative — describe what the player does with their hands.

This exercise is not asking you to build a game about the topic. It is asking you to think like an interactive-empathy designer, which is a skill you will use even in games that are not about empathy at all.

Once you have your five mechanics, rank them by the strength of the empathic move they produce. Some mechanics produce stronger feelings than others. Ranking forces you to articulate why one is stronger — usually, the stronger mechanic places more of the player's agency on the line, removes more of the tools the player is used to relying on, or lasts longer than the player would choose. Use the ranking to notice which kinds of mechanics you find most powerful; this reveals your design instincts.

Exercise 13: Audit Your Own Prototype for Ludonarrative Dissonance (Analysis, 45 minutes)

Turn the Exercise 3 analysis back onto your own prototype. For your own game, describe in one sentence what the player character does for most of their playtime. Now describe in one sentence what your narrative implies the character is.

Be honest. If your narrative says the character is a hero rescuing villagers, but the character spends most of their time optimizing an inventory and grinding resources, there is a gap. If your narrative says the character is exhausted and traumatized, but the character sprints effortlessly across the map and kills enemies without flinching, there is a gap.

The exercise is not asking you to eliminate every gap — some dissonance is unavoidable in games. The exercise is asking you to notice the gaps, so that you can decide which ones matter. Write a short memo (300-400 words) to yourself listing the three largest gaps you identified and proposing a concrete change — mechanical, not narrative — that would narrow each gap.

Exercise 14: Compose an Emotional Arc (Design, 60-90 minutes)

On a single page, plot the emotional arc of your prototype's first hour of play. Mark each meaningful moment (combat encounter, discovery, conversation, environmental shift) on a horizontal timeline, with vertical position indicating emotional intensity.

Look at the shape. Are there peaks? Are there valleys? Are the peaks separated by enough valley to allow emotional recovery? Is there a largest peak positioned as a climax of the first hour, or is intensity flat?

If your first hour is flat, redesign the sequence. Identify two or three moments where the intensity is insufficient and decide what to add — a narrative moment, a combat spike, a moment of wonder, a sudden reversal. Identify two or three moments where the intensity should be lower and decide what to remove or soften.

Present your revised arc as a second plot on the same page. Compare the two.

This exercise is the single most useful emotional-design exercise in the chapter. Most games are flat in intensity because their designers never plotted the arc. Plotting it makes the problem visible, and the problem, once visible, is usually correctable.

🪞 Learning Check-In: After completing these exercises, reflect on what emotional register your design instincts default to. Most designers instinctively reach for challenge, fantasy, and narrative. Fewer reach for sensation, fellowship, or submission. The aesthetic you undervalue is the one you probably most need to practice — it is the gap in your toolkit.