Understanding Adolescent Emotional Experiences During Gameplay: Insights from Participatory Design Workshops

Video game play is ubiquitous among adolescents, exposing them to emotionally dynamic experiences that require ongoing regulation. Understanding how adolescents experience and regulate emotions during gameplay is therefore critical to understanding the broader implications of games for their wellbeing. Yet existing work faces a methodological trade-off, struggling to capture both fast-paced gameplay dynamics and rich qualitative accounts of lived experience. As a first step, we conducted a pair of exploratory participatory design (PD) workshops with six adolescents aged 15–17. Emerging findings suggest that adolescents struggle to articulate emotions during gameplay, indicating that emotion terms alone may not capture the richness of their lived experience. Participants described emotion regulation as an active, context-dependent process tied to social and gameplay goals, underscoring the value of studying it in naturalistic settings. They also emphasised capturing emotion in minimally disruptive ways that preserve the flow of play. These findings offer preliminary methodological considerations for studying adolescent gameplay emotion.