Frustration and its effect on immersion in games : A developer viewpoint on the good and bad aspects of frustration

Frustration has been present throughout gaming history and is often considered to be negative. However, there’s been a lack of significant studies focusing on frustration and how it affects the game experience. This lead us to a qualitative study, based on nine semi-structured interviews with game developers, focusing on the effect of frustration in games. Results indicate that frustration encompass both positive and negative aspects that differ from each other in how they appear in game. Positive frustration is desirable for developers due to it improving the immersion and motivation in games and comes from players learning through frustration whereas negative frustration is undesirable and affects the game experience negatively and comes from aspects, such as technical issues, outside of the players influence.