Mapping Emotional Blueprints - A Framework for Environmental Design in Games

Abstract

This thesis investigates how psychogeography can be applied to the analysis and design of three-dimensional virtual game environments. Originating in studies of urban space, psychogeography examines how environments influence emotion, movement, perception, and behavior. This project adapts that concept to digital worlds, asking how game spaces can produce affective experiences through spatial form, atmosphere, traversal, and interpretation rather than through explicit narrative exposition alone. The study is structured around three phases. First, a comparative qualitative analysis identifies the spatial and design characteristics that make a game world psycho geographically impactful. Drawing on psychogeography, environmental storytelling, affective design, and close reading methods, the thesis proposes four core criteria: spatial autonomy, atmospheric affect, player dérive, and affective coherence. These criteria are used to distinguish between environments that function as active emotional systems and those whose emotional effects depend more heavily on cinematic or narrative control. Second, the thesis conducts an empirical affective testing phase using structured self-report questionnaires. Participants responded to selected environments from Dark Souls, Journey, and ABZÛ. The questionnaire combines the Pleasure–Arousal Dominance (PAD) emotional state model with discrete emotional descriptors and spatial attribution questions. The results suggest recurring relationships between emotional response and environmental features such as lighting, soundscape, spatial scale, openness, confinement, environmental framing, and movement rhythm. While the sample is exploratory and not statistically generalizable, the findings support the argument that players often interpret emotional experience through spatial and atmospheric conditions. Finally, the thesis synthesizes the theoretical and empirical findings into the Emotional Blueprint Framework: a design-oriented model for understanding how virtual environments shape affective experience. The framework organizes psychogeographic design around five interrelated layers: spatial form, atmospheric systems, traversal structure, interpretive openness, and emotional tendencies. It also intro duces a psychogeographic feedback loop in which spatial form influences emotional response, emotional response shapes movement behavior, and movement produces interpretation and renewed spatial perception. The thesis concludes that emotion ally resonant game environments are not defined solely by visual quality, narrative complexity, or mechanical design, but by the way spatial systems and atmospheric cues encourage players to feel, move, remember, and interpret. By positioning three dimensional game environments as designed emotional landscapes, this work contributes to psychogeographic game studies, environmental storytelling, and affective level design.