I think you are probably not serious but since you brought a new word, here is what I think:

Excitement could be incidental. Passion is something you seek continuously. For example, a person could find sky diving exciting, while not being passionate about it. Being passionate about something usually means that the participant understand the meaning behind the activity and supports the advancement and expansion of that activity in additional to feeling positive while doing that activity.

So I agree that when you get passionate about something you will feel excitement, but that probably is not the minimal definition of excitement. When you look at my thoughts about passion above, I don't think that a person needs to understand the meaning of an activity to feel excited.

In what situations would you use the word passion?

I was definitely serious, it was a serious suggestion.

Perhaps then, passion and excitement are merely differentiated by their time of lasting? Passion is more long-term, and excitement is shorter?

Interesting definitions you've got here btw.

Re: Passion

I am avoiding using long-term and short-term to draw the line because those are vague to define. I think Excitement might be harder to define than Passion so I start with Passion. Passion is actual not a word I normally use, because I never found it well-defined to mean anything. I would describe it like this:

When you feel passionate about something, you feel it and want it to feel well. Your concern and priority is of its well-being. You take the role of a giver and you are nourishing it.

In this description, the object of passion is necessarily to define passion. In the way the terminologies had been used, the object of passion is an agent (an agent includes characters, but also items and subjects). This agent has a property where it could receive assistance, and that assisting it is your voluntary goal, and the mere act of assisting it makes you feel happy because you recognizes that the progress toward a goal is met. But in additional to that happiness I think that it is necessary that the object of assistance rewards you for assisting it. Here we don't mean that you must want to change something about the object. Your goal could be to maintain a status quo (you could be passionate about keeping things the same).

A difference between Passion and Commitment so far is that Passion does not need to involve a threat.


Excitement does not require a object that is being assisted. So Passion is probably more similar to Commitment than to Excitement. Passion and Excitement might have this relation: you were initially drawn to an agent because it is exciting to interact with it, as you learn about about this agent from your interaction, you start to care for its well-being and become passionate about it. When a relation between you and your agent develops in this order, the object of passion is also a source of excitement because the excitement was the reason your were attacted to care for it. Do you think that all passion must be developed this way? It is possible for passion to develop void of excitement? We know that happiness is coupled with passion, because passion has a goal (to assist) and you feel happy when you are assisting it.

Passion Participant assists an agent and receives Recognition after having voluntarily committed to do so.

This definition means that Passion requires:

1) An agent that can be assisted.
2) The existance of Recognition of assisting the agent.
3) Participant's voluntary commitment to assist it.

The Recognition can be coming from the agent itself. Recognition is defined as:

Quote:

Recognition Participant receives indication that an agent welcomes the state of the participant agent.

For example, if you have just helped an injured dog, and the dog licks you that is a form of Recognition. If the dog is completely drugged out but its owner thanks you, it is also Recognition. Payment is not necessarily a form of recognition because it doesn't imply that agent that pays you welcomes your price. But if the payment is a form of donation that it is Recognition.

Suppose you say that you are passionate about game design. According to this definition, you mean the following qualities:

1) You must see the process of game design as an art, and you must see yourself as an assistant to its development. (This does not mean that you must have a single vision of it and you must convince others to follow your vision, since an art can be developed in many directions. Although it also includes the case when you see only one honorable outcome and you decide that the other designers are polluting the Art. This is in the realm of evaluating passion, not defining passion.)

2) You must be able to identify a form of Recognition you get by designing game. This implies that you had designed games and had gotten satisfaction from it or from other players who have played it and welcome it. This does not apply to people who think they would enjoy designing games. However, people who had not designed games could feel it Excitement in them but never Passion (according to this definition).

3) You must be voluntarily committed to game design. This includes professionals who could clearly do something else but they chose to design games. This includes the case when you are establized as an efficient game designer and that game design is your best choice as a profession. But it must imply the fact that, while supply and demand equates you a profit, you would still be designing games if you were to do it out of your own expense.

Loneliness

I suppose this is the opposite feeling of being included. Loneliness is characterized by being uninvolved in activities that others are engaging:

Loneliness Participant is not included in any plan of any agent.

This definition does not capture all forms of loneliness, but it is not the purpose of the definition to capture all possible cases.

Included Participant has a role in an agent's plan.

Challenge


Challenge Participant gets a threat that could redefine the boundary of safety but the participant believes in its ability to neutralize the threat.

I am trying to get at the meaning where the emotion of Challenge requires the participant to have some idea of what they are good at, and the Challenge must be difficult enough to put that jeopardize the participant's position. For example, if a player believes that he is good at moving shapes, and you give him a problem on moving shapes, then that problem will only be a challenge if it is something that the player believes he could solve, and if he could not solve it, his notion that he was good at moving shapes will be shaken.

This is to distinguish it from the emotion of novelty. In the feeling of novelty, the player has no previous notion of what problem he should be able to accomplish. The player would not feel the additional threat that is part of a challenge.


With this exposition, one minimal design of challenge such that the player will feel that emotion is as follows:

1) Guide the player through the style of the problem and let the player win several times

2) Acknowledge that the player has a skill in the context of this challenge

3) Give harder and harder problems of the same context.

The design support novel puzzles. The key point of this design method is that the game intentionally establishes a safe zone in the context of the problem. It is designed to make the player believe that they had attained a skill, and the subsequent problems are design to test the player's confidence in that skill. Labeling the challenge helps because that helps the player recognize what skill he has. But it would work if the player is simply recognized as being, "smart", or "skillful". Whether the acknowledgement is specifically labeled is not as important as the existance of that acknowledgement. The definition requires that player has a notion of confidence, so the game explicitly establishes it.

The reason that the player feels challenged is that the player acknolwedges his ability after solving a 'puzzle'. But if the puzzle is too decentralized or too abstract, the game would need to explicitly label the skill for the player so that the player knows that he has such a skill to help the player identity with that skill.

Insanity

This is referring to a minimum condition where the player would feel insane. Some instances of insanity in game include:

1) Stacking the blocks in the worst possible way while playing Tetris

2) Let Mario jump off a cliff and die while playing super Mario

3) Driving backward in a racing game hoping to collide and explode

A common feature of these situations is that the consequence does not lead to any game-defined progress or reward. They all lead to gameovers but the player choose to do them anyway because, either by curiosity or the simple visual stimuli, the player finds it entertaining or stimulated to perform the course of action.

The player in this emotional state subcribes to a reward system not defined by the game. In some sense, you could say that the reward of insanity is freedom. It is a kind of feeling you get when you subscribe yourself to a reward that defies an existing reward system.


Insanity Participant defies the defined and subcribes to an opposing reward set.

This definition is meant to be just one way for the player to feel insane through gameplay. There are other ways to do so, through gameplay or through other aspects of the game. For example, a game that simply reward the player for doing something that is socially abnormal could also make the player feel insane, but not necessarily so.

In some sense, the game cannot be designed to make the player feel insane directly. It is therefore easier to talk about how to design a game that supports insane actions, such as making it easy for the player to reach a situation where insane actions can be performed, or a way to let the player save the state so that there is no permanent damage to the progress if the player also cares about the defined progress in the game. Another way is to make the 'gameover' situations spectacular or stimulating, so that the player gets stimulated by insane actions and get an immediate reward while identifying that the stimulation does not promote progress in the game. This last case is designed to give the player an illusion of freedom (of choosing a different reward set that is undefined by the game that is really premediated and purposefully installed by the designer.)

Interest

Interest: Participant gets evidence of a desirable experience.

This definition means that an interaction would interest you if you get information indicating that you will get something you will like.

A simple example is showing your current score in a high-score challenge.

Another way is to associate reward with a counter. When the counter fills up, reward is distributed. This could be the bar showing your experience before leveling up, or your current count of tickets that you could trade for plushies. This assumes that the game knows you enjoy leveling up or hugging a huge plushie.

Yet another way is to let the player gain abilities that they have seen used against them. This could be like Mega Man, or looting the enemy's armor or getting their spell after defeating them or while fighting them. In a free roaming RPG, that could be the interesting part of exploring and discovering enemies and fighting them. The game does this by first letting the player know that they could obtain the abilities of the enemy, and showing the abilities of the enemy during encounters.


The definition also has use in deciding how to introduce a game concisely without showing the rules, having a play test, or having a working prototype when your game is not just a clone of some existing game. It addresses a common issue with design documents:

You are convinced that your design is fun to play, but how do you convince the others that it is fun to play without a demo?

Th definition suggests that you would first define the desirable experience your game has, then present the evidence of such experience.

What type of information are evidences of an experience?

1) Testimony
2) List of game components
3) Examples of GUI and menu options
3) List of common player decisions
4) List of player cognitive demand
5) List of random components
6) List of questions that the game answers
7) List of related or similar games
8) Motivations behind the game design

[Edited by - Wai on May 24, 2009 12:25:27 AM]

This discussion is interesting and fascinating. I have a hard time however to understand what you will use its results for ? Is that to serve as a basis for a game design ? Is that used to evaluate game designs ? Is that intended to be used in order to control a NPC ? a PC ?

Re: Application

The application is game design in general. You could use it to design or fix a game or a scenario within a game to highlight an emotion of your choice. This would naturally include the design of behaviors or NPC to satisfy a prescribed PC-NPC relation. What do you mean by using it to control a PC? This is done independently or in conjunction to the context and the theme of the game.

For example, suppose you want the player to find a game 'fun', and you know your audience likes puppies, than you could put the game in the context of puppies. That is a purely thematic approach. In the interactive approach, the definition suggests you to design the game such that the player gets to interact with something new or dangerous at their own pace. These are two separate approaches that need not be mixed. But if you mix them, you might get a design like this:

Game: Puppies Studio

In this game, the player is a photographer that takes picture of puppies. The objective is to have the puppies line up in their precribed orders, orientation posture and expression, then take the picture. The puppies could move on their own. It is the player's job to make them get into positions.

The game start with the simple level with one puppy, and the goal of having the puppy look at the camera. This is done by calling the name of the puppy before taking the photo or to attract the puppy with its favorite toy.

As the game progress, the requirements of the shots gets more complicated, and sometimes involve additional cute animals such as ducklings, chickens, kittens and bunnies, and the player could choose additional props. The requirements of the shot always come in text, it is up to the player to imagine how the final shot should look like. The player would pass as long as the written requirements are satisfied.

Each puppy is unique and might respond to different words or stimulus. Sometimes the player gets to choose which puppy to use and sometimes the player is assigned a puppy. A puppy that had worked with the player before is easier to use because the player does not need to discover what the puppy would respond to.

Choosing a puppy

The player gets whatever puppy that is available for the shot, and could recall previous puppies to use in a new shot. For example, at level 1, the player might get to choose one puppy out of two. At level 2, the player might get to choose that puppy again or one of two additional new puppies. If a puppy is not selected, the player might never see that puppy again.

Free-style mode

When the requirement of a level is fulfilled, the player gets access to the props and actors used in that shot. The player could get to a freeshooting mode to take additional pictures that could be used as computer wallpapers or cropped as avatars.

[Edited by - Wai on May 27, 2009 3:50:30 PM]

Attachment

Participant encounters an agent that the participant associates with an instance of their identity.


Examples:

o An icon that the player has selected to represent them
o A pet that was there when the player got an unique experience
o A object that was present when the player got an uncommon experience
o The first time the player is presented a model of themself
o A new name that the player is asked to give themself
o A creative work that the player is asked to make
o An object that represents a committment that the player is asked to make and fulfilled on behalf of themself