Repeated Environmental Object Association and Its Influence on Player Emotion and Decision-Making
Yongchen WANG
Level Design
Repeated Environmental Object Association and Its Influence on Player Emotion and Decision-Making
For my Thesis, I designed and developed a single-player Dying Light level, titled“ Conditional Illusion,” to study how repeated environmental object association could influence player emotion and decision-making. My goal was to explore whether neutral objects could gain emotional meaning after being repeatedly paired with specific in-game events.
In the level, players encountered radios associated with horror events and printers associated with safe events. After these repeated pairings, the level tested whether players would react differently when seeing the same objects again in neutral contexts.
I chose this topic because I was interested in how level designers can use environmental objects not only as visual details, but also as emotional and behavioral cues.
The project took approximately ten months to complete, including research, level design, implementation, playtesting, data collection, and analysis. Through this project, I developed stronger skills in research-driven level design, emotional pacing, environmental storytelling, player observation, and data interpretation. I also gained experience working with survey results, gameplay recordings, and facial expression analysis.
This project could be useful to the video game industry by offering practical insight into how repeated object-event pairings may shape player expectations, emotional responses, and route choices in narrative or horror-focused level design.
64 LEVEL DESIGN