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

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.