Space maze : experience-driven game camera control

Virtual camera control is a key factor in game experience be- cause the camera dictates how players see the game world. As the complexity and unpredictability of games increases, automatic camera control becomes a fundamental require- ment. In this paper, we present a game technology demon- strator that showcases automatic camera control capable of creating dissimilar experiences within a 3D prey/predator game. An adaptation algorithm informed by predictors of subjective experiences adjusts the behavior of the camera to influence the experience of the player throughout the game.This research was supported, in part, by the ILearnRW (project no: 318803) and the C2Learn (project no. 318480) FP7 ICT EU projects.peer-reviewe

Towards player-driven procedural content generation

Generating immersive game content is one of the ultimate goals for a game designer. This goal can be achieved by realizing the fact that players' perception of the same game differ according to a number of factors including: players' personality, playing styles, expertise and culture background. While one player might find the game immersive, others may quit playing as a result of encountering a seemingly insoluble problem. One promising avenue towards optimizing the gameplay experience for individual game players is to tailor player experience in real-time via automatic game content generation. Specifying the aspects of the game that have the major influence on the gameplay experience, identifying the relationship between these aspect and each individual experience and defining a mechanism for tailoring the game content according to each individual needs are important steps towards player-driven content generation.peer-reviewe

The games for health prototype

In this paper we present a prototype developed to explore the application of game design and technology to the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). We describe the design process that led to the development of the prototype and the included aspects of game design and game technology, how the approach and the prototype differ from previous work in using virtual environments in the treatment of PTSD, and we outline the first clinical trials of the prototype.peer-reviewe

Enhancing health care via affective computing

Affective computing is a multidisciplinary field that studies the various ways by which computational processes are able to elicit, sense, and detect manifestations of human emotion. While the methods and technology delivered by affective computing have demonstrated very promising results across several domains, their adoption by healthcare is still at its initial stages. With that aim in mind, this commentary paper introduces affective computing to the readership of the journal and praises for the benefits of affect-enabled systems for prognostic, diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.peer-reviewe

Analysing the relevance of experience partitions to the prediction of players’ self-reports of affect

A common practice in modeling affect from physiological signals consists of reducing the signals to a set of statistical features that feed predictors of self-reported emotions. This paper analyses the impact of various time-windows, used for the extraction of physiological features, to the accuracy of affective models of players in a simple 3D game. Results show that the signals recorded in the central part of a short gaming experience contain more relevant information to the prediction of positive affective states than the starting and ending parts while the relevant information to predict anxiety and frustration appear not to be localized in a specific time interval but rather dependent on particular game stimuli.peer-reviewe

Generic physiological features as predictors of player experience

This paper examines the generality of features extracted from heart rate (HR) and skin conductance (SC) signals as predictors of self-reported player affect expressed as pairwise preferences. Artificial neural networks are trained to accurately map physiological features to expressed affect in two dissimilar and independent game surveys. The performance of the obtained affective models which are trained on one game is tested on the unseen physiological and self-reported data of the other game. Results in this early study suggest that there exist features of HR and SC such as average HR and one and two-step SC variation that are able to predict affective states across games of different genre and dissimilar game mechanics.peer-reviewe

Variations des stratégies d'anticipation visuelle en fonction de la règle dans un jeu vidéo

National audienceDans certains jeux vidéo, le joueur a besoin d'anticiper le mouvement d'objets, d'obstacles ou de cibles pour atteindre son but. Cependant, des recherches ont montré que les stratégies visuelles utilisées dans un environnement visuel dynamique variaient selon le but des individus. Le but de l'expérience exploratoire présentée dans cet article était de comparer les stratégies oculaires de participants jouant dans un même environnement de jeu nécessitant de l'anticipation visuelle selon deux règles du jeu différentes. Les deux règles du jeu vidéo utilisé consistaient soit à " éviter ", soit à " toucher " un maximum d'obstacles avec une balle. L'enregistrement des mouvements oculaires montre que l'anticipation est plus importante et le balayage de l'écran de jeu plus large quand les joueurs doivent éviter les obstacles que quand ils doivent les toucher. Les implications de ce résultat sur les stratégies oculaires optimales et la conception de jeux vidéo sont discutées

What does touch tell us about emotions in touchscreen-based gameplay?

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ACM. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.Nowadays, more and more people play games on touch-screen mobile phones. This phenomenon raises a very interesting question: does touch behaviour reflect the player’s emotional state? If possible, this would not only be a valuable evaluation indicator for game designers, but also for real-time personalization of the game experience. Psychology studies on acted touch behaviour show the existence of discriminative affective profiles. In this paper, finger-stroke features during gameplay on an iPod were extracted and their discriminative power analysed. Based on touch-behaviour, machine learning algorithms were used to build systems for automatically discriminating between four emotional states (Excited, Relaxed, Frustrated, Bored), two levels of arousal and two levels of valence. The results were very interesting reaching between 69% and 77% of correct discrimination between the four emotional states. Higher results (~89%) were obtained for discriminating between two levels of arousal and two levels of valence

Rating vs. preference : a comparative study of self-reporting

This paper introduces a comparative analysis between rating and pairwise self-reporting via questionnaires in user survey experiments. Two dissimilar game user survey experiments are employed in which the two questionnaire schemes are tested and compared for reliable affect annotation. The statistical analysis followed to test our hypotheses shows that even though the two self-reporting schemes are consistent there are significant order of reporting effects when subjects report via a rating questionnaire. The paper concludes with a discussion of the appropriateness of each self-reporting scheme under conditions drawn from the experimental results obtained.peer-reviewe

Adapting models of visual aesthetics for personalized content creation

This paper introduces a search-based approach to personalized content generation with respect to visual aesthetics. The approach is based on a two-step adaptation procedure where (1) the evaluation function that characterizes the content is adjusted to match the visual aesthetics of users and (2) the content itself is optimized based on the personalized evaluation function. To test the efficacy of the approach we design fitness functions based on universal properties of visual perception, inspired by psychological and neurobiological research. Using these visual properties we generate aesthetically pleasing 2D game spaceships via neuroevolutionary constrained optimization and evaluate the impact of the designed visual properties on the generated spaceships. The offline generated spaceships are used as the initial population of an interactive evolution experiment in which players are asked to choose spaceships according to their visual taste: the impact of the various visual properties is adjusted based on player preferences and new content is generated online based on the updated computational model of visual aesthetics of the player. Results are presented which show the potential of the approach in generating content which is based on subjective criteria of visual aesthetics.Thanks to all the participants of the interactive evolution experiement. The research was supported, in part, by the FP7 ICT project SIREN (project no: 258453) and by the Danish Research Agency, Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation project AGameComIn; project number: 274- 09-0083.peer-reviewe