Architectures of Affect: Anticipating and Manipulating the Event in Processes of Videogame Design and Testing

Abstract

This paper examines the process of designing and testing multiplayer levels for a large, commercially released videogame. In doing so, it argues that videogame designers work to create the potential for positively affective encounters to occur—a complex and elusive outcome that is key to creating critically and commercially successful multiplayer videogames. By unpacking various examples from this process, the paper attends to debates regarding the distribution and transmission of media affects. Instead of acting to deterministically shape action, I suggest that processes of videogame design are predicated on producing contingency, albeit a contingency that designers attempt to manage and control. In this case, positively affective outcomes can only be understood as a relation between the code space of the game and the embodied techniques users generate in response to these environments.