Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

6. The player constructs knowledge (reflective experience) with that emotion embedded, it will be
remembered and used in the future to plan actions (motivational properties) at the same time
emotional categories are redefined (reinforced or negated).
Steps 5 and 6 fall into the domain of reflective experiences (erfahrung): the “journeyed-through”
creation of knowledge.
Perceptive experience is elaborated (appraised) by the player and eventually generates reflection.
But not all reflections are equivalent, it is necessary to distinguish between trivial and memorable
experiences because these two kinds of experiential knowledge affect personality in different ways.
As we have seen earlier in the definition of the term, everything seems to generate experience. So
trivial perceptive experience requires a certain amount of repetition and, iteration after iteration,
eventually it creates knowledge (reflection) and changes behavioural patterns. But some
perceptions are memorable in such a way that they become the icons and pointers to precise
patterns of emotional activation and behavioural response that engendered them in the first place,
without requiring iterations. These are the perceptions that generate “flashbulb memories”
individuated by Brown and Kulik [8]. If game designers manage to successfully incorporate
memorable perceptions in their games, chances are high that they will also ignite iconic reflections
in players increasing the game’s impact on the player. I am not advocating the creation of games
that are made exclusively of memorable perceptions but merely suggesting that they can represent
an effective shortcut and alternative to the repetition needed to convert trivial perception into
memorable reflection. For example, there can be two ways for a player to learn a new mechanic of
play and therefore create knowledge: repetition of the act (trivial perception) or occurrence of an
iconic, indexing event (memorable perception). As a concrete example we can examine a player
being taught that right-clicking several times causes the avatar to run. Repetition of perceptive
experience: a disembodied aid vocalizes the instructions each time the player walks. Memorable
perceptive experience: a NPC is in danger and if the player doesn’t reach him in time he’ll die.
Emotionally charged reflection becomes rooted in memory [8, 9] and is also remembered more
often and with more clarity and detail [10, 28, 35, 27, 29].
3 From reflective experience (Erfahrung) to personality
In order to investigate how the emotionally tagged reflection can influence the personality it is
necessary to enter the domain of neurosciences.
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