I believe so we should be more concrened how drama and game mechanics could merged.

Blinkmonk's society made an audio game for Blind.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/blind-monks-society

That's a good experiment I think.

[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]Welcome to gamedev and whilst you may achieve some answers to your questions in your post, you sure as hell chose a topic area that despite having been around a fair number of years still remains very much in it's infancy when it comes to being defined with any real clarity. In essence you are looking for a fusion of a soft science (psychology) into a hard science (engineering) framework and even to this day that is a very tricksome reality to establish comprehensively.[/font]

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The gamasutra articles seem a too shallow in my opinion. They don't go into detail and I feel that they just scratched the surface a bit and established some "rules" and "tips" by oversimplifying everything. Most of the time I feel that the way they use to model a player is a super simplistic state-machine.

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[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]What are the mathematical equations that define love, hate, fear, hope, loss? (If someone says "eating chocolate = love"...I will look at you with disdain! ) In the absence of having a defining set of math, how do you then determine appropriate values for emotional triggers to be programmed into a game. If you approach this from a social sciences aspect i.e. psychology then how do you program the experience of say "love"? Issues such as: add the pheromones, define the audio cues. The simple answer is you can't...or at least you cannot do it very well. In a game you have already removed the smell and taste of things from this reality you are creating, your tactile ability is muted (think vibrating joysticks/controllers), so your immersion into this world is primarily through the use of audio and visual elements. However I am somewhat harsh as it has been demonstrated that simply an audio element can promote panic and fear. I refer to the infamous "War of the Worlds" radio play done by Orson Welles as an example. Adding visual elements I only have to think of the many emotions attached to movie stars, models etc. The question often becomes -- what is it in these elements that provokes the emotional response. The trouble with psychology is that there is a plethora of opinions, a great deal of inferences and very few defined answers. No person meets the absolute norm in psychology instead people exist within a set of ranges...deviation outside of one of these ranges is seen as abnormal. Ironically if you dig deep enough you come to realisation that having a deviation outside the norm is a norm in itself. These ranges also alter with regard societal / cultural / ecological etc etc changes. Immigrating from one country to another with a dissimilar culture, environment etc can cause all sorts of flow on effects including a rise in xenophobia in inhabitants introduced to the immigrant simply because the behaviour is "different" from their norm.[/font]

[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]This topic has me rambling. Do player's toons get created with simplistic realities...yes. Because as you add more complex social/emotional elements you create an environment that swiftly bashes into the limitations of the above-mentioned fusion not having been developed very well. Defining what elements contribute to a specific state can be tricky -- however at the end of the day if you buy the girl; flowers, chocolate, candy and jewellery you will probably be fine...maybe.[/font]

[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]There is a lot of literature out there about emotional states, creating them and changing them. There is a lot of literature covering the fields of psychology. There is a lot of literature out there regarding audial and visual stimuli. However I can't really pick out one text and say this is a defining text. I would be interested if someone could actually point out a definitive text though. The fact is the information you are looking for is scattered amongst many different sources and you will have to hunt through them. One field you might pay attention to is the field of "Human-Computer Interaction" but even this covers a range of areas and some not in the depth I would like.[/font]

[font=arial,helvetica,sans-serif]There are so many ways that I can continue on this post but tbh If I don't stop I will not eat for several months while typing. Some points to leave you with -- look at the existing media (including games) that do stand out as moments of inducing emotions. Instead of trying to create a superbly complex interactive system -- define a set of limitations so that you can actually create an achievable goal, and perhaps the final point: games with simplistic systems with little respect for the player beyond rewarding players with a happy set of beeps or minor virtual reward have a legitimate place in the psyche of our race...else they would not thrive the way they do.[/font]

There are hundreds if not thousands of studies of these types hence my earlier overuse of the words "There is a lot of literature". It really is not that easy to extract completely relevant data without wading through a giant pool of festering mind innards

Some links for you though


[size="3"][color="#0000ff"][size="3"][color="#0000ff"]http://recherche.univ-lyon2.fr/emc/IMG/pdf/royet_al.pdf

[size="3"][color="#0000ff"][size="3"][color="#0000ff"]http://neuro.cjb.net/content/20/20/7752.full

[size="3"][color="#0000ff"][size="3"][color="#0000ff"]http://www.brainmusic.org/MBB91%20Webpage/Sloboda_1991.pdf

[size="3"][color="#0000ff"][size="3"][color="#0000ff"]http://ced.kaist.ac.kr/pdf/kei2008.pdf

[size="3"][color="#0000ff"][size="3"][color="#0000ff"]http://www.edmondschools.net/Portals/3/docs/Terri_McGill/READ-LITTLE%20ALBERT.pdf

[size="3"][color="#0000ff"][size="3"][color="#0000ff"]http://www.livedescribe.com/wiki/live/shared/clt2/shared/Papers%20For%20Jorge/Empirieal%20Studies%20of%20Emotional%20Response%20to%20Music.pdf

The problem is that emotions and frames of mind are not one dimensional. Instead of simple levels of response (heart rates, hormonal levels), because they are too vague and can be correlated to many emotions, the designer would have to know everything that's going on on the players mind, including smoothed flows of memory (past) and anticipation (future).

There aren't many ways to do it.

Asking the testers is only good for knowing if it's working or not, but not exactly how or why. Unless you have a really huge sample, say, like using crow-computing for it. To analyse proper subject responses it'd take a combination like Kinnect, FaceAPI and some retina analyser. To properly map and calculate, body language, hand movements, facial expressions and eye behaviour, and cross the information into a Neural Network to find all related patterns and compare with what's going on in-game.

The second way is if the designer is really good at emulatory empathy, and subject himself to test with a hightened level of self awareness while still avoind thinking about the gamey part of his own creation. Which is hard for most people. Sure you can keep a mic on at all times and try to record the moment-to-moment sensation, and ven get drunk before the experiment to reduce your designer's thoughts, but still, you brain is faster than your mouth and you can't.

For a more dynamic approach you can make an AI agent intended to simulate player responses and the duration and intensity or stimuli and it's relatioship with other stimuli, previous or foreseen. Then you could make every in-game event add input into the agent's mind simulating what'd be happening with the player at the exact same moment. This way you would keep a rough model of what could be going on in the player's mind, and lead the experience based on that. The more accurate or elegant the model, and the better the stimuli evaluation system, the closer to the actual, more complex, player frame of mind the simulation will be, and so the better will be opportunities to cause the desired effects.

To add to what I wrote above: the thing a game designer has to do is learn a lot, about a lot of things, then apply creativity. Rather than looking for solutions or formulae others have already found and offered up for you, you need to learn about psychology, then get creative and come up with something interesting of your own.

Pretty much this. There's no recipe, formula or "game design for the masses".

but somehow I am hoping that there are some studies about emotional responses to certain stimuli.

Of course there are. Your best bet would be to look up undergraduate psychology textbooks.

I think I know your train of thought: "psychologists say X stimulate fear" and "I put X in my game", hence "my game is scary".

Unfortunately, "what to put in a game/movie/book etc to make it scary" is a deep topic that will take a long time to unravel. The shortest answer from biology would be to pump the body with chemicals that induces fear...sell drugs lol.