A Cognitivist Theory of Affordances for Games

Abstract

Affordances, broadly construed as opportunities for action, have been used to explain game-related phenomena in a variety of different contexts. This paper presents a cognitivist theory of affordances, which is general enough that it subsumes several related theories, yet precise enough that it provides a useful lens through which to view games. The framework is a re-contextualization of older work that unifies approaches taken in the fields of ecological psychology, interaction design, and human-computer interaction. The Cognitivist Theory of Affordances in Games is thus a theoretical contribution, which synthesizes several views by presenting three independent manipulable entities that are relevant to the study of games: 1) real affordances, what actions are possible in a game, 2) perceived affordances, what actions players perceive possible in a game, and 3) feedback, perceptual information introduced in the game by its designers to advertise real affordances in the hopes of eliciting accurate perceived affordances.