Off-Peak: An Examination of Ordinary Player Experience

Videogames’ increasing cultural relevance and suffusion into everyday use contexts suggests they can no longer be considered novelties. Broadly speaking, games research at CHI has concerned two forms of peak experience—historically, research aimed to support flow, or maximise enjoyment and positive emotions; more recently, scholarship engages with more varied experiences of intense emotion, such as emotional challenge. In different ways, both approaches emphasise extra-ordinary player experience (PX). Conversely, videogame play and PX have become more routine—indeed, more ordinary—as the medium’s cultural presence grows. In this paper, we argue that HCI games research is conceptually ill-equipped to investigate these increasingly common and often desirable experiences. We conceptualise “ordinary player experience” – as familiar, emotionally moderate, co-attentive, and abstractly memorable – articulating a phenomenon whose apparent mundanity has seen it elude description to date. We discuss opportunities to productively employ ordinary PX in HCI games research, alongside conceptual implications for PX and player wellbeing.