Targeting horror via level and soundscape generation

Horror games form a peculiar niche within game design paradigms, as they entertain by eliciting negative emotions such as fear and unease to their audience during play. This genre often follows a specific progression of tension culminating at a metaphorical peak, which is defined by the designer. A player’s tension is elicited by several facets of the game, including its mechanics, its sounds, and the placement of enemies in its levels. This paper investigates how designers can control and guide the automated generation of levels and their soundscapes by authoring the intended tension of a player traversing them.The research was supported, in part, by the FP7 ICT projects C2Learn (project no: 318480) and ILearnRW (project no: 318803), and by the FP7 Marie Curie CIG project Auto- GameDesign (project no: 630665).peer-reviewe

Sonancia : a multi-faceted generator for horror

Fear and tension are the primary emotions elicited by the genre of horror, a peculiar characteristic for media whose sole purpose is to entertain. The audience is often lead into tense and fearful situations, meticulously crafted by the authors using a narrative progression and a combination of visual and auditory stimuli. This paper presents a playable demonstration of the Sonancia system, a multi-faceted content generator for 3D horror games, with the capability of generating levels and their corresponding soundscapes. Designers can also guide the level generation process, by defining an intended progression of tension, which the level generator and sonification will adhere to.peer-reviewe

RankTrace : relative and unbounded affect annotation

How should annotation data be processed so that it can best characterize the ground truth of affect? This paper attempts to address this critical question by testing various methods of processing annotation data on their ability to capture phasic elements of skin conductance. Towards this goal the paper introduces a new affect annotation tool, RankTrace, that allows for the annotation of affect in a continuous yet unbounded fashion. RankTrace is tested on first-person annotation lines (traces) of tension elicited from a horror video game. The key findings of the paper suggest that the relative processing of traces via their mean gradient yields the best and most robust predictors of phasic manifestations of skin conductance.peer-reviewe

Framing tension for game generation

Emotional progression in narratives is carefully structured by human authors to create unexpected and exciting situations, often culminating in a climactic moment. This paper explores how an autonomous computational designer can create frames of tension which guide the procedural creation of levels and their soundscapes in a digital horror game. Using narrative concepts, the autonomous designer can describe an intended experience that the automated level generator must adhere to. The level generator interprets this intent, bound by the possibilities and constraints of the game. The tension of the generated level guides the allocation of sounds in the level, using a crowdsourced model of tension.peer-reviewe

A holistic approach for semantic-based game generation

The Web contains vast sources of content that could be reused to reduce the development time and effort to create games. However, most Web content is unstructured and lacks meaning for machines to be able to process and infer new knowledge. The Web of Data is a term used to describe a trend for publishing and interlinking previously disconnected datasets on the Web in order to make them more valuable and useful as a whole. In this paper, we describe an innovative approach that exploits Semantic Web technologies to automatically generate games by reusing Web content. Existing work on automatic game content generation through algorithmic means focuses primarily on a set of parameters within constrained game design spaces such as terrains or game levels, but does not harness the potential of already existing content on the Web for game generation. We instead propose a holistic and more generally-applicable game generation solution that would identify suitable Web information sources and enrich game content with semantic meta-structures.The research work disclosed in this publication is partially funded by the REACH HIGH Scholars Programme — Post- Doctoral Grants. The grant is part-financed by the European Union, Operational Programme II — Cohesion Policy 2014- 2020 Investing in human capital to create more opportunities and promote the wellbeing of society — European Social Fund.peer-reviewe

Psychophysiology in games

Psychophysiology is the study of the relationship between psychology and its physiological manifestations. That relationship is of particular importance for both game design and ultimately gameplaying. Players’ psychophysiology offers a gateway towards a better understanding of playing behavior and experience. That knowledge can, in turn, be beneficial for the player as it allows designers to make better games for them; either explicitly by altering the game during play or implicitly during the game design process. This chapter argues for the importance of physiology for the investigation of player affect in games, reviews the current state of the art in sensor technology and outlines the key phases for the application of psychophysiology in games.The work is supported, in part, by the EU-funded FP7 ICT iLearnRWproject (project no: 318803).peer-reviewe

Modelling affect for horror soundscapes

The feeling of horror within movies or games relies on the audience’s perception of a tense atmosphere — often achieved through sound accompanied by the on-screen drama — guiding its emotional experience throughout the scene or game-play sequence. These progressions are often crafted through an a priori knowledge of how a scene or game-play sequence will playout, and the intended emotional patterns a game director wants to transmit. The appropriate design of sound becomes even more challenging once the scenery and the general context is autonomously generated by an algorithm. Towards realizing sound-based affective interaction in games this paper explores the creation of computational models capable of ranking short audio pieces based on crowdsourced annotations of tension, arousal and valence. Affect models are trained via preference learning on over a thousand annotations with the use of support vector machines, whose inputs are low-level features extracted from the audio assets of a comprehensive sound library. The models constructed in this work are able to predict the tension, arousal and valence elicited by sound, respectively, with an accuracy of approximately 65%, 66% and 72%.peer-reviewe

Atmosphere & Challenge: An Exploration of Dissonant Player Experiences

Dissonance means an unusual combination of any two things. Two dissonant experiences in video games which could lead to undesirable player states are thematic dissonance and difficulty dissonance. Thematic dissonance potentially annoys players by breaking the atmosphere, and difficulty dissonance by preventing players with low skill from progressing past unbalanced challenges, resulting in rage-quits. This thesis seeks to deepen the understanding of dissonant experiences in video games through two experiments measuring the player experience as affected by different audio and practice conditions respectively. Results indicate that the experience colloquially referred to as a rage-quit is directly affected by avatar death events and game-specific skill and is related to lower levels of heart rate variability (HRV) and higher levels of electrodermal activity (EDA), which implicates feelings of stress. This project successfully advances the definition of video game atmosphere as the level of subjective thematic fit or association between the audio and visual components of a game’s setting, and indicates that musical thematic dissonance may lead to higher intensity negative valence facial events

Targeting Horror via Level and Soundscape Generation

Horror games form a peculiar niche within game design paradigms, as they entertain by eliciting negative emotions such as fear and unease to their audience during play. This genre often follows a specific progression of tension culminating at a metaphorical peak, which is defined by the designer. A player's tension is elicited by several facets of the game, including its mechanics, its sounds, and the placement of enemies in its levels. This paper investigates how designers can control and guide the automated generation of levels and their soundscapes by authoring the intended tension of a player traversing them