Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

flow between the player, the avatar, the game world and the arising emotions and reflective
experiences.
2 From emotion to reflective experiences (Erfahrung)
As proven by numerous studies [8, 9], emotionally tainted reflective experiences are stored in
memory and used as pointers, indexes and prototypes to help define and catalogue emotions in
individual ways. These emotionally charged memories are also used to plan courses of action for
the future under similar circumstances. Hence, emotionally tagged memories might also play an
important role in the definition of personality. It is therefore pivotal to look further into the
definition of emotion and how it affects the anchoring of reflective experiences in memory. The
most widely accepted view is that emotions occur as a complex sequence of events. The sequence
begins when a person encounters an important event or thought (perceptive experience). Some
physiological reactions are triggered in the body, then the person interprets the meaning of the
encounter (the order of these two steps is much debated), and the interpretation determines the
feeling that is likely to follow and the resulting behaviour. For example, someone who encounters
an escaped lion (instigating stimulus, perception) would probably interpret the event as dangerous
(cognitive appraisal, reflection). The sense of danger would cause the individual to feel fear. Each
feeling is followed by or happens simultaneously with a series of physical changes (physiological
correlates) and impulses to action (motivational properties, behaviours), which are responses to the
experience that started the sequence. Thus, the person who met the lion would probably run away,
increasing the person's chance of survival. This definition will help us understand the mutual
influences that emotions and reflective experiences have with each other and the role that they
both play in the definition of personality. A typical flow to describe how emotions arise while
playing and how they fasten experiences can be found in the following occurrence in the game
Doom 3 (ID Software, 2005, Activision): the player is surprised/scared by a demon appearing
behind the avatar’s back and learns that enemies can spawn out of nothing. Fear helps player
internalizing the event, as described in figure 1:
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