Spectrum: Exploring the Effects of Player Experience on Game Design

Spectrum is a player experience (PX)-focused game design tool that responds to a gap in current practice: most existing approaches treat PX only indirectly or fragment it across facets such as immersion and fun. Built through bottom-up design research that drew on existing design tools and emotion theory, the tool consolidates 178 emotion-related terms into 70 groups arranged as opposing pairs. Its guiding principles emphasize emotional and affective responses, inclusivity across experience types, and a structure that remains flexible in use. The resulting card-based instrument is a minimalist, double-sided taxonomy of 50 terms designed to invite subjective interpretation rather than prescribe outcomes.

The central empirical finding comes from a workshop study with three groups of four designers, each averaging four game ideas, which demonstrated the tool's productivity. The study also revealed a consistent tendency for designers to translate experiences into mechanics or themes, often abandoning experiential vocabulary once a concrete idea emerged. Designers acknowledged player experience only superficially unless prompted, and several viewed intense emotions such as terror or love as difficult to achieve in analogue games, pointing to a perceived shortage of appropriate vocabulary and a restricted conception of what player experience can encompass.

A player survey with 87 responses corroborated these workshop findings, showing that players struggle to map their own gameplay onto specific experience types, although many found the exercise valuable for reflection. The analysis points to a persistent divide between designers and players, which the author attributes to the inherent ambiguity of PX. Treating experience as subjective, the author argues that designers should focus on making particular experiences more likely rather than guaranteeing them.

The conclusion is that Spectrum provides a practical vocabulary for both analysis and design, while noting that designers' self-imposed definitions of emotions can constrain how fully the tool is used.