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Thinky games are emotional experiences, and designing with those emotions in mind will help you build better games

Speaker: Caroline Clark, Queensguard Games

Games are emotional experiences. This is very clear in genres like first person shooters or adventure games. However, thinky games are about logic and deduction, and it’s not immediately clear that emotions are even present, let alone important. I will make the case that despite appearances, thinky games are indeed emotional experiences, and in articulating how different mechanics create different emotions, we can better understand why some thinky games stick with us longer than others, and what to consider when building our own.