Bad Affect as Game Design, Or It Feels Good For Overwatch To Feel Bad

There's a lot of talk in game design about how to make people feel things.

For  the Skinner Box people, the ones who are trying to psychologically dial  in exactly how good it should feel to win a match of a competitive card  game you play on your phone, you do it through stimulus. You click the  button, and it lights up just right. When you open your box of loot that  you got from winning way too many games, it shakes in just the right  way. But if you hold off on that shake-y click, you might be able to  upgrade that bronze box into a silver box when you collect enough  doodads. It's all about the design of making things click in your lizard  brain.

While most, if not all, massively popular games are trying  to go down that route for various (cough, financial) reasons, I think  that lots of game designers would still say that they are going for  "classic" methods of getting you to feel good about a game. They're  designing levels, skill trees, and open-world environments with those  tried-and-true ideas of flow or game feel in mind.

Those  theories aren't the same, but they're attached to each other in the  belief that games are at their best when their mechanics and  expectations are clearly communicated to players. Each desires an  end-state of consistency, and the optimal gameplay experience is one in  which the player seamlessly melds into the experience of playing a game.  With that established, you can play with the model, but that initial  smooth space of play is critical.

I've done some research at my day job on player toxicity in games, and I've even written about my experience of toxicity  in a game that many claimed had "fixed" the problem of players being  rude as hell to each other. The general belief about toxicity is that it  interrupts the smooth space of play--that it generates a bad feeling in  players, and that bad feelings tend to spread out into everything.  Riot, the developers behind League of Legends, promotes a lot of statistics that suggest that toxic players make for a bad time in a quantifiable and repeatable way, and that if you want to have a good time in a game then you should avoid being toxic.

I've now put an embarrassing amount of time into Overwatch for  the PS4, and I've come to a weird conclusion about how I think bad  affects, or bad feelings, might impact a seamless state of play. I think  that they help generate one. I think negative feelings might be fully  incorporated into my seamless and fun experience of play. And that's  weird.

In other words, I think becoming consistently angry about particular things in Overwatch might have a calming effect that generates a smooth space of play. I'm meditative in my being angry.

To be clear, this is probably an edge case. I play a lot of Overwatch,  but I never play with a headset unless I'm in a party with friends. I  would say that the total percentage of games that I have played in a  party with those friends is probably less than 10% of my total games  played.

So when I get angry in Overwatch, it's with that  weird little radial communication system. There are no tanks and we're  dying over and over again to Hanzo headshots from across the map? I'm  spamming the "Thank You" command. No healer and I'm dying over and over?  Spamming the "Need Healing" command. I've finally bit the bullet and  I'm playing Mercy, but my team is fighting way off the point and is  letting every McCree who has ever played the game jump right up into my  face with utmost glee? It's me, on the couch, hitting the "Thanks!"  button until I'm locked out of using it.

I'm not proud of any of  that, and I've tried to cut it down because it helps no one, but at this  point it's automatic. I'm on autopilot when I sarcastically use these  commands to signal my unhappiness, and from a personal perspective it's  an entirely neutral thing. While I'm sure that deep in my brain I am  feeling some kind of anger, on the top level I am just hitting that  button to signal my unhappiness.

My ability to signal that I am having a bad time allows me to process that out within the game itself. It's rare that I put Overwatch down  and have any lingering feelings of anger or frustration, even if I lose  several times in a row. That radial dial of bad feelings allows me to  put it all out there, and importantly, to leave it there.

It's  probably crucial that it's (mostly) impossible to target another player  with sarcasm using the communication wheel. Short of walking up to a  teammate and spamming the emotion right in their face (which I guess I  could do), there's no way for me to say "THANKS!" to a particular  Reinhardt after he fails to use his shield for the 50th time in a row. I  can only denote that I am unhappy, and that lack of targeting  means that I don't have people messaging me on PSN asking me what my  problem is (or why I am so bad at the game).

It feels weird to  admit to a kind of passive haterism, but this particular anonymizing and  untargetable generation of bad affects sorta works. I get to  immediately divest myself of unhappiness, and other players are able to  do the same. It's a way of expressing anger in the game without anyone  knowing that they're to blame or that you're angry at them. You're just someone spamming a button, and you can be ignored.

My  weird play experience suggests to me that toxicity (and this is, I'm  sure, considered toxic play) can be the baseline of that consistent and  full game state that generates the "best" or "elegant" gameplay  experiences. And that's pretty weird.