Abstract. Video games, entertainment, education, and training media have been developed for many years, and eliciting emotional experiences is an integral part of that process. Production and editing of the media in order to produce the desired emotional experiences can be expensive and cumbersome to media designers. This paper presents a pilot study intended to show that such experiences can be induced with after-the-fact audio-visual effects. As subjects of the user study, players are given the same virtual environment with two emotional states: fear, and peace. Over 70 % of players report feeling the proper emotional response in both environmental states, revealing that it is indeed possible to induce emotional response with after-the-fact audio-visual effects, hinting at future possibilities for drag-and-drop emotional experience filters.

Inducing Emotional Response in Interactive MediaKeenan Marcus Reimer Video games, and entertainment media have been developed for many years, and eliciting emotional experiences is an integral part of that process. Producing and editing game content in order to affect desired emotional experiences can be expensive and cumbersome to developers. This paper presents a study intended to show that such experiences can be affected with simple after-the-fact audio-visual effects. As subjects of the study, participants experience three different emotional states, fear, peace, and none, over three rounds and in three different game environments. They are given a simple narrative in each environment that directs them to gather various objects.The fear and peace emotional states are represented by carefully designed sets of simple audio-visual effects, while the none state represents the absence of any additional audio-visual effects. That states are randomly and non-repeatedly applied to the game environments for each participant. Over 50% of responses indicate proper emotions across emotion states for all levels, and rounds, and there are statistically significant effects between most emotional state comparisons. This means that it is indeed possible to induce emotional response with after-the-fact audio-visual effects, and it hints at future possibilities for drag-and-drop emotional experience filters