Affect, Emotion, and Embodied Experience in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Sources and Significance – Blog 8
This post looks at how Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice creates an embodied emotional experience through affective design, focusing on sensation, immersion, and player perception rather than narrative alone.
Affective Design in Games
Hellblade treats emotion as something you feel physically, not just something the story tells you to understand. Instead of leaning on exposition, it uses sound, movement, camera distance, and control to generate intensity. That connects to a wider shift in media studies away from representation as the main focus, and toward how media produces sensation, atmosphere, and bodily response.
Affect and Emotion
A key distinction in this session is between emotion and affect. Emotions are feelings we can usually name fear, sadness, anger while affect refers to pre-conscious sensations like tension, unease, and discomfort (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010). Hellblade hits you at that affective level first. Before I can clearly label what I’m experiencing, the game builds pressure through whispering voices, warped audio, and moments where vision and certainty are limited. The point isn’t immediate “meaning”; it’s intensity.
Sound and Sensory Pressure
Sound design is the engine of that intensity. Binaural audio makes voices feel uncomfortably close, as if they’re inside your head rather than in the environment. Those voices don’t just deliver narrative information they interfere with play. They create doubt, urgency, and fear, pulling your attention and shaping how you behave. It’s a strong reminder that affect in games can function as a force that directs action, not just a layer of representation.
Embodiment and Discomfort
The game also uses the body to create discomfort. The camera stays tight to Senua, narrowing your field of vision and making spaces feel claustrophobic. Combat is slow and heavy, producing fatigue instead of empowerment. These choices make experience itself part of the meaning: realism and emotional truth come from what it feels like to move through the world, not from visual accuracy or clean narrative clarity.
Ethics of Emotional Engagement
Hellblade also raises an ethical question about affective design. By putting the player in a vulnerable position, it invites empathy, but it also manages attention through discomfort. Ash argues that games organise affect to guide player responses, turning emotion into a form of engagement and control (Ash, 2015). In Hellblade, that organisation pulls you closer to Senua while also asking you to endure the experience rather than escape it.
Conclusion
Overall, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice shows how games can operate as powerful affective systems. Through sound, embodiment, and sensory pressure, it produces emotion that is often felt before it’s understood. It’s a clear example of how contemporary games can move beyond representation and engage players at the level of affect, making feeling central to meaning and experience.
References
Ash, J. (2015) The Interface Envelope: Gaming, Technology, Power. London: Bloomsbury. Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G.J. (2010) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spinoza, B. (1996) Ethics. London: Penguin. Ninja Theory (2017) Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice [Video game]. Ninja Theory.