Emotional Media
Film, television, music, advertising and marketing have for years known that increasing the emotional engagement with consumers has huge benefits.
With little or no emotional attachment to media, a product or service, consumers can walk away at any point. By enhancing experience and creating a more personal emotional link, consumers have a far more engaging experience and form longer term and more intense relationships with films, music and even brands.
Interactive Entertainment
Videogames are now at the cutting edge of many areas of technology. From the most sophisticated multi-player 3D worlds, found on home consoles, through to the hundreds of millions of players only now discovering the delights of gaming through their smartphones, gaming is finally reaching its true potential.
However, games rarely offer the same level of emotional intensity which film, television, music – or brands – can evoke. This leaves games at a disadvantage, but also offers an opportunity for developers and publishers to introduce not only a greater range of emotions into their titles, but increase the existing emotional engagement of their games.
Games with a greater emotional attachment for players will create a superior experience for players, leading to greater attachment and more successful titles.
Introducing Emotion
As videogames grow increasingly sophisticated and complex, it becomes far more difficult to create an emotionally immersive environment. The current tools tend to be based around scripting and custom-built events.
This means all of the various game elements are prepared and ‘scored’ beforehand and triggered as the player moves through a fixed route and/or set of tasks.
This can work for simpler titles, but any sufficiently large, multi-player or sandbox type of game can invalidate the scripting option, or break the consistency of the game ‘world’, breaking the emotional bond with the player.
Dynamic Solutions
A better solution to this would be to alter the game elements, using a software system which allows the various game elements – sound effects, score, lighting, camera effects, etc. to be controlled dynamically.
This allows for greater freedom in terms of gameplay and actually reduces and simplifies the development process, thanks to the reduction in scripted elements, which have to be changed to reflect any amendments to level design.
Musemantik – Enhancing Engagement
Musemantik has created two products which allow game developers to integrate dynamic emotionally aware elements into their games – and reduce development time and costs at the same time.
Introducing Emrzr (Pronounced ‘Immerser’)
Emrzr SENSE is the emotional framework, which allows developers to specify, create and dynamically control the emotional mood throughout a game.
Emrzr ARRANGE is Musemantik’s unique soundtrack system, which uses the Emrzr SENSE framework to dynamically generate and deliver music and sound effects within a game, keeping it emotionally accurate, relevant and fresh.