Playable Pressure: Affective Dramaturgy and Selective Realism in the Design of a VR Emergency-Response Serious Game

2026-08-11

AI Summary

This study addresses the ethical challenges of representing human suffering in virtual reality (VR) serious games for emergency response training, particularly the risk of reducing distress to adjustable difficulty levels. Through critical design document analysis and qualitative content analysis, the research introduces two core concepts: “affective dramaturgy” and “dual responsiveness”—encompassing in-game reactions and post-simulation debriefings—to illuminate how emotional and moral dimensions are susceptible to problematic technocratic framing. The work identifies six categories of stress-inducing mechanisms and their associated design issues, proposing a sensitizing reflective framework centered on professional purpose, representational ethics, and systemic accountability. This framework offers theoretical guidance and ethical reference points for the design of serious games that responsibly engage with human vulnerability and moral complexity.

Abstract

Professional simulations stage not only procedures but models of what should command attention, which emotions belong in competent practice, and whose distress becomes part of the task. This article develops affective dramaturgy through critical design-document analysis of a virtual-reality emergency-response project. The corpus comprises two non-public production records. We identify six families of specified pressure and examine how sensory staging, proximity, trigger authority, task conflict, and response allocation imply a selectively receptive triage professional. The documented design can make emergency work morally and socially crowded, yet it can also turn grief, vulnerability, and mental-health-coded behavior into adjustable difficulty. We propose answerability at two levels-in-play response and post-play debriefability-and derive case-based questions about occupational purpose, representation, adaptation, and accountability. These questions are sensitizing propositions, not a validated framework for user effects or emergency practice.

Problem

• affective dramaturgy
• selective realism
• VR serious game
• emergency-response simulation
• emotional design

Innovation

• affective dramaturgy
• playable pressure
• selective realism
• VR serious game
• answerability