The specific meaning of empowerment pertains to context. While it literally refers to an increase in power, it changes forms when examined in alternative frameworks. As a useful tool for understanding social dynamics in the physical world, power is most often used to describe the personal and communal influence within such social environments, as in the works of Jo Rowlands (1995, 102). However, it is not uncommon to hear about player empowerment in the context of games as well.

In such a context, empowerment still usually holds meanings concerning the non-digital world, like accessibility or social power dynamics. Confusion can arise when using the term to describe a moment of play while emphasizing design structures or digital spaces. This requires closer analysis of the direct play experience, or phenomenology, of the player. In this framework, the scope is limited to the experienced personal empowerment of the player, as emerging from the game design and mechanics. This is still linked to other layers of empowerment while also being unique from them.

In game studies, empowerment has occasionally been used to describe game design structures. For example, Brändle et al. (2023, 3) describe an empowering action to be one that offers more future options for the player in terms of progress. It is something that enables exploration of the content within the game further. The article frames exploration as an intrinsic drive towards a state of maximum influence, distancing the idea from theories revolving around reducing uncertainty, also present in contemporary research (e.g. Deterding et al. 2022).

Empowerment in game design could then be described as increased influence over the game world, often through an avatar. For a classic example, collecting the red mushrooms in Super Mario Bros. (1985) empowers Mario to break blocks, sustain a hit from an enemy, and receive a fire flower from a future block, which comes with its own empowerment. Many games, especially those that revolve around increasing some kind of character skill statistic, use the concept as a central design element.

Other games may revolve around “loot”, items found within the world and rewarded after victories. In games such as Diablo IV (2023) or Borderlands 3 (2019), obtaining more powerful loot to help with increasingly difficult challenges is one of the central characteristics of their game design. Empowerment is thus a commonly used tool in generating engaging gameplay and describing various structures in research, though it still keeps offering more alternative perspectives into the play experience.

The feeling of increased ability and influence can be a relevant motivation towards, or within, playing a certain game. This can be framed through many, often overlapping concepts commonly used through game studies, such as affordance or agency. The former emphasizes possibilities, affordances, offered to an individual by the environment (Linderoth 2013, 89). Agency has a similarly multifaceted definition to empowerment. It considers diversity and representation, narratological player impact within a story, and “material affordances of video games” all within the same term of agency (Bódi 2022, 13-14). Different approaches to this theme offer different unique perspectives. Emphasizing the concept of empowerment gives the conversation a phenomenological stint when we consider it through a player and their experience.

The avatar works as an extension of the player in the digital world. Thus, changes in one’s avatar should translate as some type of feelings and experience for the player as well. Feelings of increasing capability for success or exploration should then arise from empowering game design. Empowerment in game design means increasing the player’s influence within the game world through new or upgraded items or skills. While this can be separated from the empowerment generated by the actual increase in player skill or feeling empowered outside of the game in other ways, getting stronger is often connected both in experience and intentional design.

What remains unclear is the relationship between the player and the game design. My future research aims to answer how these design elements are interacted with by different types of players within different types of games. What kind of a role do these mechanics play in design? If the play experience can be divided into identifiable parts, like “feeling empowered”, they should be connected to identifiable parts of the game design, like “collecting a power-up”. By exploring many different types of play experiences through varied perspectives, perhaps a tool can be designed to increasingly understand the complicated network of experience that constitutes play as it relates to game design.

References

Brändle, F., Stocks, L.J., Tenenbaum, J.B. et al. (2023). Empowerment contributes to exploration behaviour in a creative video game. Nat Hum Behav 7, 1481–1489. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01661-2

Bódi, B. (2022). Videogames and Agency. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003298786

Deterding S, Andersen MM, Kiverstein J and Miller M (2022). Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play. Front. Psychol. 13 (924953). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.924953

Linderoth, J. (2013). Beyond the digital divide: An ecological approach to gameplay. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.26503/todigra.v1i1.9

Rowlands, J. (1995). Empowerment Examined. Development in Practice, 5(2), 101–107. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4028929