GDC Feature: 'Emotion Boot Camp: Putting More Emotion Into Play'

The latest update to Gamasutra's Game Developers Conference 2006 coverage features a tutorial by Nicole Lazzaro of XEODesign and Katherine Isbister of the Rensselaer Games Research Laboratory entitled "Emotion Boot Camp: Putting More Emotion into Play" offering tools and tactics for creating emotion in games. In this excerpt, the session starts off with an interesting exercise: The session began with Nicole Lazzaro asking the audience to do a small exercise in which they were to pretend a hundred dollar bill was on the floor somewhere and everyone was to try and search for it. After a minute of half-hearted searching from most and some ham-fisted antics from a few, she then informed them that there was in fact a real hundred dollar bill somewhere in the room to be found. Another minute of much more enthused searching still led to no one any richer when the audience was then asked to reach into the back pocket of the person to the immediate right and soon the hundred dollar bill was in the hands of a Swedish woman. You can read the full Gamasutra coverage, including "the four keys" to unlocking and manipulating the hearts of all gamers (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).