What Dan advances is a kind of aesthetic theory for games that might be called the primal aesthetic – the view that intensity of emotions are the hallmark of great art, or perhaps just of great games-as-art. The former is an impossible road to walk, since it makes rollercoasters and crashing productivity software into great artworks, something few if any people are going to want to back. But the latter route is viable – I don’t hold this aesthetic viewpoint myself, since I believe game stories, and the quasi-emotions they evoke, can be even more engaging and interesting than the primal emotions of play, and thus hold to what I’ve called a fiction aesthetic for games, where the confluence of the fiction of the rules and the fiction of the world creates new kinds of artistic value.
Chris Bateman in Stories and Games (3): Experiencing Fiction, about Dan Cook’s Shadow Emotions and Primary Emotions (via notgames)