Emotions and performance in rugby

Purpose: This study investigated emotion-performance relationships in rugby union. We identified which emotions rugby players experienced and the extent to which these emotions were associated with performance, considering how emotions unfold over the course of a game, and whether the game was played at home or away. Methods: Data were gathered from 22 professional male rugby union players using auto-confrontation interviews to help identify situations within games when players experienced intense emotions. We assessed the intensity of emotions experienced before each discrete performance and therefore could assess emotion-performance relationships within competition. Results: Players identified experiencing intense emotions at 189 time-points. Experts in rugby union rated the quality of each performance at these 189 time-points on a visual analog scale. A Linear Mixed Effects model to investigate emotion-performance relationships found additive effects of game location, game time, and emotions on individual performance. Conclusion: Results showed 7 different pre-performance emotions, with high anxiety and anger associating with poor performance. Future research should continue to investigate emotion-performance relationships during performance using video-assisted recall and use a measure of performance that has face validity for players and coaches alike

How Color Properties Can Be Used to Elicit Emotions in Video Games

Classifying the many types of video games is difficult, as their genres and supports are different, but they all have in common that they seek the commitment of the player through exciting emotions and challenges. Since the income of the video game industry exceeds that of the film industry, the field of inducting emotions through video games and virtual environments is attracting more attention. Our theory, widely supported by substantial literature, is that the chromatic stimuli intensity, brightness, and saturation of a video game environment produce an emotional effect on players. We have observed a correlation between the RGB additives color spaces, HSV, HSL, and HSI components of video game images, presented to = 85 participants, and the emotional statements expressed in terms of arousal and valence, recovered in a subjective semantic questionnaire. Our results show a significant correlation between luminance, saturation, lightness, and the emotions of joy, sadness, fear, and serenity experienced by participants viewing 24 video game images.We also show strong correlations between the colorimetric diversity, saliency volume, and stimuli conspicuity and the emotions expressed by the players. These results allow us to propose video game environment development methods in the form of a circumplex model. It is aimed at game designers for developing emotional color scripting

Meaning and emotion in Squaresoft\u27s Final Fantasy X: Re-theorising realism and identification in video games

This thesis takes the position that traditional theories of realism and identification misrepresent the relationships between players and videogames, and that a cross·disciplinary approach is needed. It uses Ed Tan\u27s (1997) and Torben Grodal\u27s (1997) analyses of narrative, cognition, and emotion in film as a basis for interrogating existing research on, and providing a working model of, video gameplay. It develops this model through an extended account of Squaresoft\u27s adventure role-playing game Final Fantasy X (FFX) (2001), whose hybrid narrative and game macrostructures foreground many of the problems associated with video games. The chapters respectively address; existing research on video games; how perceptual qualities of the interface determine the reality status of gameplay; how narrative and game codes regulate or retard interest; FFX\u27s henneneutic coding of reality; the dual narrative and game coding of video game characters; the uses and limits of the psychoanalytic concept of identification when analysing video games; how gameplay promotes empathetic emotions towards characters; how players develop empathetic emotions towards themselves; and how the disjunctive quality of play may have un existential quality

Group Fairness and Game Theory

In this paper I extend Matthew Rabins model of fairness equilibria (1993) to groups of individuals. This allow me to introduce three aspects from reality that are absent in game theory: i) individuals discriminate in favor of members of their own groups, ii) individuals like individuals that not only are kind to them, but are kind to other individuals, specially individuals of their own groups, and iii) individuals discrimate in favor of members of groups they like. I define a new equilibrium that takes in consideration this emotions, what I call group fairness equilibrium. Rabin defines the mutual-max outcomes for a single game as outcomes where each player maximize the other players material mayoffs and the mutual-min outcomes as outcomes where each player minimize the other players material payoffs. Some basic results of my model are that a combination of strict Nash equilibrium in several games, will always be a group fairness equibrium for large values of the material payoffs, and that any outcome that is either strictly mutual-max for both games or strictly mutual-min for both games is a group fairness equilibrium for large values of the material payoffs.

Investigating the Factors That Contribute to In-App Purchases in Online Gaming:The Stimulus-Organism-Response Model

Advancements in online payment mechanics has revolutionised the monetisation of online games. One such method known as In-App Purchases (IAPs) - small purchases of virtual goods for real world currencies, has become a popular method of increasing the profitability of online games. In-App Purchases are made only by small percentages of players in a game and the reasons influencing players to make In-App Purchases vary. Exploring the influencers of players online purchase intent in online games may assist game developers in increasing players’ willingness to make In-App Purchases. The monetisation mechanics of games and consumers’ willingness to make online purchases are an important focus in the online gaming industry when determining the profitability of a game. Thus, coming to understand the monetisation mechanics of a game and the way it influences consumers online purchase intent can be useful to game developers and marketers when developing new games. The purpose of this study was, thus, to assist both game developers and marketers in understanding the influencers of online purchase intent in online games, in order to better create and market more profitable online games. The Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model was used to better understand InApp purchasing behavior, where Stimulus refers to game characteristics, Organism refers to gameplay experience that could lead to the Response resulting in Online Purchase Intent. The factors identified that contributed to this response include: Active Control, Reciprocal Communication, Social Identity, Skill and Challenge which constitute the Stimulus constructs of the S-O-R model; the factors which constitute Response include: Flow, Cognitive Involvement and Affective Involvement. The model was tested using an online survey and tested through the use of Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling software. The results of the study provide support for the conceptual framework and indicate that Online Purchase Intent may be most influenced by the way players personally identify with a game, and how much of a challenge the game presents. The results also indicate that emotional involvement with a game has a significant positive influence on Online Purchase Intent and that online purchases may be impulse purchases. The findings of this study imply that game developers may be able to influence Online Purchase Intent by increasing the level challenge found in games. Additionally, marketers may be able to influence online purchases through the use of emotional appeals in game advertisements and by offering limited edition sales of InApp Purchases. Future research related to this study should explore which emotions are the greatest influencers of Online Purchase Intention, and how these emotions influence the willingness to make In-App Purchases

Model-based Player Experience Testing with Emotion Pattern Verification

Player eXperience (PX) testing has attracted attention in the game industry as video games become more complex and widespread. Understanding players’ desires and their experience are key elements to guarantee the success of a game in the highly competitive market. Although a number of techniques have been introduced to measure the emotional aspect of the experience, automated testing of player experience still needs to be explored. This paper presents a framework for automated player experience testing by formulating emotion patterns’ requirements and utilizing a computational model of players’ emotions developed based on a psychological theory of emotions along with a model-based testing approach for test suite generation. We evaluate the strength of our framework by performing mutation test. The paper also evaluates the performance of a search-based generated test suite and LTL model checking-based test suite in revealing various variations of temporal and spatial emotion patterns. Results show the contribution of both algorithms in generating complementary test cases for revealing various emotions in different locations of a game level

EMOTIONS RECOGNITION IN VIDEO GAME PLAYERS USING PHYSIOLOGICAL INFORMATION

Video games are interactive software able to arouse different kinds of emotions in players. Usually, the game designer tries to define a set of game features able to enjoy, engage, and/or educate the consumers. Through the gameplay, the narrative, and the game environment, a video game is able to interact with players' intellect and emotions. Thanks to the technological developments of the last years, the gaming industry has grown to become one of the most important entertainment markets. The scientific community and private companies have put a lot of efforts on the technical aspects as well as on the interaction aspects between the players and the video game. Considering the game design, many theories have been proposed to define some guidelines to design games able to arouse specific emotions in consumers. They mainly use interviews or observations in order to deduce the goodness of their approach through qualitative data. There are some works based on empirical studies aimed at studying the emotional states directly on players, using quantitative data. However, these researches usually consider the data analysis as a classification problem involving, mainly, the game events. Our goal is to understand how the feelings, experienced by the players, can be automatically deducted, and how these emotional states can be used to improve the game quality. In order to pursue this purpose, we have measured the mental states using physiological signals in order to return a set of quantitative values used to identify the players emotions. The most common ways to identify emotions are: to use a discrete set of labels (e.g., joy, anger), or to assess them inside an n-dimensional vector space. Albeit the most natural way to describe the emotions is to represent them through their name, the latter approach provides a quantitative result that can be used to define the new game status. In this thesis, we propose a framework aimed at an automatic assessment, using physiological data, of emotions in a 2-dimensional space, structured by valence and arousal vectors. The former may vary between pleasure and displeasure, while the latter defines the level of physiological activation. As a consequence, we have considered as most effective to infer the players\u2019 mental states, the following physiological data: electrocardiography (ECG), electromyography on 5 facial muscles (Facial EMG), galvanic skins response (GSR), and respiration intensity/rate. We have recorded a video, during a set of game sessions, of the player's face and of her gameplay. To acquire the affective information, we have shown the recorded video and audio to the player, and we have asked to self-assess her/his emotional state over the entire game on the valence and arousal vectors presented above. Starting from this framework, we have conducted two sets of experiments. In the first experiment, our aim was to validate the procedure. We have collected the data of 10 participants while playing at 4 platform games. We have also analyzed the data to identify the emotion pattern of the player during the gaming sessions. The analysis has been conducted in two directions: individual analysis (to find the physiological pattern of an individual player), and collective analysis (to find the generic patterns of the sample population). The goal of the second experiment has been to create a dataset of physiological information of 33 players, and to extend the data analysis and the results provided by the pilot study. We have asked the participants to play at 2 racing games in two different environments: on a standard monitor and using a head mounted display for Virtual Reality. After we have collected the information useful to the dataset creation, we have analyzed the data focusing on individual analysis. In both analyses, the self-assessment and the physiological data have been used in order to infer the emotional state of the players in each moment of the game sessions, and to build a prediction model of players' emotions using Machine Learning techniques. Therefore, the three main contributions of this thesis are: to design a novel framework for study the emotions of video game players, to develop an open-source architecture and a set of software able to acquire the physiological signals and the affective states, to create an affective dataset using racing video games as stimuli, to understand which physiological conditions could be the most relevant in order to determine the players' emotions, and to propose a method for the real-time prediction of a player's mental state during a video game session. The results to suggest that it is possible to design a model that fits with player's characteristics, predicting her emotions. It could be an effective tool available to game designers who can introduce innovative features to their games

Essays in applied and psychological game theory: cooperation, corruption and political economy

The first chapter of the thesis applies game theory in order to examine the question of income redistribution from a fresh angle. In particular, it considers a mechanism of patron-client relationships which enables a society's rich class to limit the extent of redistributive taxation. In effect, the aim of patronage is to "buy" the votes of some poor citizens and lower the demand for redistribution. Income tax rates are further shown to depend negatively on government corruption in the form of fund capture, provided that a democratic regime is in place and the government cares about reelection. This link is tested empirically using cross country data and the evidence is consistent with the predictions of the model.The second and third chapters shift the focus of attention towards the process of decision making in games and the role of emotions in this process. Corruption, which is taken as exogenous in the first chapter, is now considered in detail as the outcome of a cooperation game between two players, with a third player (or "third party") having a stake in the outcome of the game but no opportunity to take any direct action. This situation is analysed using psychological game theory. Players' utility functions are extended to include beliefs and the emotions that these generate. In the theoretical model of the second chapter the emotion of interest is guilt and this is conditioned on the perceived beliefs of the third party. The two players are then less likely to collude if they believe that the third party expects a favourable outcome for herself. The model solves for the conditions under which collusion emerges in equilibrium. The main assumption of the model (i.e. the role of beliefs in decision making) as well as some of its predictions are then tested using an economic experiment in the third and final chapter of the thesis. The experimental findings strongly support the impact of beliefs on the incidence of collusion: Perceived expectations of the third party about the outcome of the game appear to be the most significant factor that determines the outcome itself. There seems to be a mechanism of self-fulfilling expectations which can be applicable to a number of economic situations, including corruption in public administration

Explore using digital game and empathy as tools for self-expression An Art Exhibition of Digital Game

For this thesis, the researcher proposes a unique angle that uses digital games as a tool for self-expression. Empathy theory will be applied to the game making process to help players understand the artist’s expression. This process suggests that there is a potential for game makers to understand, model and instantiate more resources on affective address and embody those into game content in a way that acknowledges and accommodates the player’s processes of emotional cognition. The practical project associated with the thesis is an experimental game that communicates to the players the emotions and life experiences that the game artist is willing to express. The anticipated result, the images, music, interaction and story are crafted in order to tell a single story, but the game experience should remind players about their own memories, experiences and special stories outside the game

Intentions and Social Interactions

In psychological games, higher-order beliefs, emotions, and motives - in addition to actions - affect players’ payoffs. Suppose you are tolerated as opposed to being genuinely accepted by your peers and “friends”. In particular, suppose you are invited to a party, movie, dinner, etc not because your company is desired but because the inviter would feel guilty if she did not invite you. In all of these cases, it is conceivable that the intention behind the action will matter and hence will affect your payoffs. I model intentions in a dynamic psychological game under incomplete information. I find a complex social interaction in this game. In particular, a player may stick to a strategy of accepting every invitation with the goal of discouraging insincere invitations. This may lead one to erroneously infer that this player is eagerly waiting for an invitation, when indeed his behavior is driven more by strategic considerations than by an excessive desire for social acceptance. I discuss how being tolerated but not being truly accepted can explain the rejection of mutually beneficial trades, the choice of identity, social exclusion, marital divorce, and its implication for political correctness and affirmative action.guilt, intentions, psychological game, second-order beliefs, social interaction