5.2.2. Appreciation

5.2.2. Appreciation

The appreciation component of ludic habitus evaluates design elements of a digital game as they are encountered during play. As part of this process, the player creates personal opinions about specific aspects of a game’s design – among others, its visual style, its soundscape, its narrative components, its mechanics, and the affective qualities of the feedback loop that the game helps to support through its design configuration (how a game feels to play). Like game perception, game appreciation also works on several levels, from evaluations of individual elements as implemented in a specific situation to those of the game as a designed whole. Perceived design choices in individual games can also be evaluated in relation to other familiar games and generic subfields, as illustrated by Scott and Adam (TestingHouse) and their metainterpretation of the game as a commentary on the horror genre or an indictment of violence in digital games.

As the second and third study have shown, this component of ludic habitus has the most impact on the style by which a particular game is played by a particular player. The player’s personal play preferences, accumulated over the course of their lifetime of experience with digital games, act as taste patterns, guiding the player in their discernment of the played game as a designed possibility space and providing the basis for their mode of engagement with it. While the perceptual component of ludic habitus provides the kernel for a particular pattern of behavior, the appreciative tier “fuels” certain behaviors at a given moment during the act of play.

When deciding on a style of play behavior, the players’ taste patterns link their perception of the game and their actions therein. They do so through attribution of salience for certain individual design elements and modes of behavior made possible by the game’s design, at the expense of others. The differences in play between Arthur (Inglenook, Puzzle-Solver) and Miles (Inglenook, Explorer) in the second study illustrate this process. The former did not care much for Inglenook’s narrative dimension and focused only on puzzle-solving, effectively seeing and playing the game as a puzzle game, while the latter expressed greater appreciation for almost all of the design aspects of Inglenook, interpreting the game as an indie game inviting a specific contemplative method of play and playing it accordingly. Because they impact both perception and action in acts of digital gaming practice – how we experience and how we play games – taste patterns are therefore a vital component of ludic habitus; they provide the background for playful, affective player behavior during the act of digital gaming practice. This was observable across the three studies, but perhaps nowhere as clear as in the case of infrequent or non-players, such