Emotional engagement and Darkest Dungeon

Videogames are evolving as a medium, so in order to reach all kinds of audiences games with very different types of gameplay and metaphors are being made. One of these new types of titles is disempowering fantasies, in which the player experiences a metaphor that has the objective to make him or her feel weak or vulnerable. In order to understand this new phenomenon, we will analyze Darkest Dungeon (Red Hook, 2016), a game that uses the empathy that the player has for his characters to create a powerful experience that resonates with the user. You can check the first part of it, Disempowering fantasies in video games.

Currently, I'm working on translating the final presentation. It will be published before the official release date of Darkest Dungeon II (not EA). Here you can see it without audio.

In the meantime, you can check the full paper (In Spanish) here.