Computationally Mediated Synthetic Affect as a Mechanism for Literacy Engagement: Analyzing Adolescents' Livestreamed Videogame Play

ABSTRACT The most affectively powerful narrative texts adolescents encounter are often videogames, yet literacy research has only begun to examine the feelings games produce and what they do for engagement. Extending Robinson and Leander's concept of synthetic affect—feelings co‐created between humans and machines—from AI‐generated content to interactive media, we theorize computationally mediated synthetic affect: real feelings arising as games execute human‐authored design in real time, entangled with players' bodies and choices. Four features of videogames' computational systems produce these feelings: player consequentiality (players act and bear the outcomes), adaptive responsiveness (the game adjusts to accumulated choices), mechanical restriction (the game withdraws abilities at charged moments), and bodily entrainment (the game draws players' bodies into its rhythms). Analyzing two adolescents' livestreamed play of Life is Strange across 8 weeks at a community youth center, using livestreaming as a postdigital read‐aloud, we document guilt, urgency, helplessness, and frustration emerging through ludonarrative dissonance and harmony, moments where a game's story and mechanics clash or align. The players grew these feelings into criticism of how games normalize violence, ethical reasoning about witnessing domestic violence, and structural critique of institutional power. For engagement theory, we contribute an expansion of the construct in the tradition of its prior expansions. We argue that when a text's computational operations participate in producing the feelings that engage its readers, the locus of engagement shifts from the individual reader to the human–machine ecology, and we show how such engagement's traces become observable in real time, through talk and bodies.