Gamer emotions in laughter

Abstract This study is motivated by the assumption that today’s function-oriented game localisation approach has room for improvement by incorporating an affect-oriented approach. It draws on the concept of “affective framing” in a game with humour as “emotionally competent stimuli”. Laughter as emotion data were collected from German, Japanese and Irish participants playing in their native language relevant versions of the US-origin casual game Plants vs. Zombies. This small-scale empirical study, combined with gamer interviews and gameplay trajectory, reveal evidence of specific functions of gamer emotions across all three groups, most often as a relief during game play, facilitating the gamer’s ability to retain engagement by accessing the emotional function of humour. The data suggest that affective framing through humour that is made culturally relevant is deemed more important for the German group than the other groups. This group negatively perceived cultural stereotypes in the game, whereas the Irish group perceived cultural associations positively. The focus on user emotions brings the neglected affective dimension to the fore and towards affect-oriented game localisation as interdisciplinary research.