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

Facial Electromyography-based Adaptive Virtual Reality Gaming for Cognitive Training.

Cognitive training has shown promising results for delivering improvements in human cognition related to attention, problem solving, reading comprehension and information retrieval. However, two frequently cited problems in cognitive training literature are a lack of user engagement with the training programme, and a failure of developed skills to generalise to daily life. This paper introduces a new cognitive training (CT) paradigm designed to address these two limitations by combining the benefits of gamification, virtual reality (VR), and affective adaptation in the development of an engaging, ecologically valid, CT task. Additionally, it incorporates facial electromyography (EMG) as a means of determining user affect while engaged in the CT task. This information is then utilised to dynamically adjust the game’s difficulty in real-time as users play, with the aim of leading them into a state of flow. Affect recognition rates of 64.1% and 76.2%, for valence and arousal respectively, were achieved by classifying a DWT-Haar approximation of the input signal using kNN. The affect-aware VR cognitive training intervention was then evaluated with a control group of older adults. The results obtained substantiate the notion that adaptation techniques can lead to greater feelings of competence and a more appropriate challenge of the user’s skills

Creating an Emotionally Adaptive Game

To optimize a player's experience, an emotionally adaptive game continuously adapts its mechanics to the player's emotional state, measured in terms of emotion-data. This paper presents the first of two studies that aim to realize an emotionally adaptive game. It investigates the relations between game mechanics, a player's emotional state and his/her emotion-data. In an experiment, one game mechanic (speed) was manipulated. Emotional state was self-reported in terms of valence, arousal and boredom-frustration-enjoyment. In addition, a number of (mainly physiology-based) emotion-data features were measured. Correlations were found between the valence/arousal reports and the emotion-data features. In addition, seven emotion-data features were found to distinguish between a boring, frustrating and enjoying game mode. Taken together, these features convey sufficient data to create a first version of an emotionally adaptive game.</p