How the Emotional Content of Music Affects Player Behaviour and Experience in Video Games
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research studying music's effect on video games has focused on musical properties, such as tempo, to create particular emotional player experiences. However, music is complex, and selecting music using a particular parameter may not guarantee that the music will be experienced in a particular way (e.g., higher-tempo music will not necessarily make a player feel more rushed, as previous work implies). Through a player study, we demonstrate that music labelled by its emotional content (e.g., peaceful or powerful) could provide a better means for designers to choose music for particular emotional effects. Our results show that powerful (rather than higher tempo) music can significantly increase experienced tension and risk-taking play style compared to peaceful music. We provide game designers and composers with critical new information about how music can be chosen and designed to target play experience and shape player behaviour, suggesting that music's effects in gameplay need to be studied more holistically.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".