Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to understand better the relationship between the experiences of games and their emotional contexts: that is, how emotions and feelings impact how gamers experience and conceive of their play. Project Zomboid, a multiplayer horror zombie-survival game, provides a setting and history charged with emotion and feeling, on top of which the human-survival drama plays out. Using ethnographic methods, including participant-observation in a Project Zomboid Discord server, play experiences and five semi-structured interviews, this thesis explores the affective nature of Project Zomboid as an expression of the zombie genre: as collections of bodies, containers, and surfaces for emotions, feelings, and ideas. It explores how players of Project Zomboid utilize game mechanics and player-made modifications to harness the game’s ability to foster affectively intensive experiences, including game settings as well as adding, removing or changing ones already present. The thesis also explores how communities adjacent to video games like the Project Zomboid Discord perform the role of sustaining those affective relationships between players/users and the game: how players, users, and developers experience the Project Zomboid Discord community as an “emotional ecosystem,” an ecology of feeling and sentiment that informs discourses and interactions surrounding the game and its community. Whether they are deemed good or bad, and whether there are high or low stakes activities involved, these values and opinions reflect encounters, experiences, and emergences of the sociocultural dimensions of emotion in social interaction.