Engaging females with a model for affective storytelling.

Abstract

Female gamers have been underrepresented in some game genres. One of the reasons for this is the gender difference in players’ emotional experience. According to psychological studies, females are more likely to be concerned with other’s emotions and tend to involve their emotions in the storytelling by empathising with the characters and experiencing other-directed emotions [12]. Given these considerations, this paper proposes a model for affective storytelling which aims to create an engaging emotional experience and involve the player’s emotion with the characters. More importantly, the player’s emotions, evoked by appraising the story and empathizing with the characters, determine the character’s behaviors and therefore have an impact on the whole storyline. Since the model for affective storytelling aims to create an engaging emotional experience for the player without following a goal-oriented narrative approach, it appears that males and females might have a different user experience in this model for affective storytelling. Future work therefore will be carried out to develop an affective storytelling system and test if females are more engaged and satisfied with the affective storytelling system.