Towards general models of player affect

While the primary focus of affective computing has been on constructing efficient and reliable models of affect, the vast majority of such models are limited to a specific task and domain. This paper, instead, investigates how computational models of affect can be general across dissimilar tasks; in particular, in modeling the experience of playing very different video games. We use three dissimilar games whose players annotated their arousal levels on video recordings of their own playthroughs. We construct models mapping ranks of arousal to skin conductance and gameplay logs via preference learning and we use a form of cross-game validation to test the generality of the obtained models on unseen games. Our initial results comparing between absolute and relative measures of the arousal annotation values indicate that we can obtain more general models of player affect if we process the model output in an ordinal fashion.peer-reviewe

Towards general models of player experience : a study within genres

This project has received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement No 951911, and from the University of Malta internal research grants programme Research Excellence Fund under grant agreement No 202003.To which degree can abstract gameplay metrics capture the player experience in a general fashion within a game genre? In this comprehensive study we address this question across three different videogame genres: racing, shooter, and platformer games. Using high-level gameplay features that feed preference learning models we are able to predict arousal accurately across different games of the same genre in a largescale dataset of over 1, 000 arousal-annotated play sessions. Our genre models predict changes in arousal with up to 74% accuracy on average across all genres and 86% in the best cases. We also examine the feature importance during the modelling process and find that time-related features largely contribute to the performance of both game and genre models. The prominence of these game-agnostic features show the importance of the temporal dynamics of the play experience in modelling, but also highlight some of the challenges for the future of general affect modelling in games and beyond.peer-reviewe