Using Frustration in the Design of Adaptive Videogames

In efforts to attract a wider audience, videogames are beginning to incorporate adaptive gameplay mechanics. Unlike the more traditional videogame, adaptive games can cater the gaming experience to the individual user and not just a particular group of users as with the former. Affective videogames, games that respond to the user's emotional state, may hold the key to creating such gameplay mechanics. In this paper we discus how the emotion frustration may be used in the design of adaptive videogames and the ongoing research into its detection and measurement

A Toolkit for Exploring Affective Interface Adaptation in Videogames

From its humble beginnings back in the early 1960’s the videogame has become one of the most successful form of HCI to date. However if we look more closely at the interactions between the game and gamer it becomes evident little has changed since the advent of SpaceWar back in 1961. These interactions are for the most part static and thus predictable, given a particular set of circumstances a game will always react in one particular manner despite anything the player may actually do. Because of this the expected lifespan of a videogame is inherently dependant on the choices the videogame provides; once all possible avenues have been explored the game loses its appeal. In this paper we focus on adapting techniques used in the field of Affective Computing to solve this stagnation in the videogames market. We describe the development of a software development kit (SDK) that allows the interactions between man and machine to become dynamic entities during play by means of monitoring the player’s physiological condition

Affective Videogames and Modes of Affective Gaming: Assist Me, Challenge Me, Emote Me

In this paper we describe the fundamentals of affective gaming from a physiological point of view, covering some of the origins of the genre, how affective videogames operate and current conceptual and technological capabilities. We ground this overview of the ongoing research by taking an in-depth look at one of our own early biofeedback-based affective games. Based on our analysis of existing videogames and our own experience with affective videogames, we propose a new approach to game design based on several high-level design heuristics: assist me, challenge me and emote me (ACE), a series of gameplay "tweaks" made possible through affective videogames

Liquid: Designing a Universal Sensor Interface for Ubiquitous Computing

This paper describes the specification of a universal sensor interface (USI) called Liquid, which allows for the collection and representation of sensor readings from a wide range of different sensors. We illustrate how it is possible for Liquid to collect data from a broad spectrum of sensors using a select method of sensor classification and to present this data within a common environment. We explore how this approach can extend itself to include sensors not yet conceived of with relative ease. Finally we explain how the Liquid USI provides developers of ubiquitous systems with a general-purpose toolkit for the development of sensor-based applications

Exploiting P2P in the Creation of Game Worlds

Peer-to-peer networks are a promising platform for supporting entirely decentralized, distributed multi-user gaming; however, multi-player games typically require highly predictable performance from the underlying network. This is at odds with the inherently unreliable nature of peer-to-peer environments. Existing approaches to providing peer-to-peer support for multi-player gaming focus on compensating for the unpredictability of the underlying network. We propose that rather than trying to compensate for these factors, they can be exploited together with information about the peer-to-peer network in order to address the problem of maintaining a novel gaming experience in the absence of a central authority. In order to explore our proposition, we model the measurable properties of P2P networks within a distributed multi-player game – NetWorld. We do this in such a way that the heterogeneous and unpredictable nature of the peer-to-peer environment becomes a positive part of the player’s experience

Affective Videogames and Modes of Affective Gaming: Assist Me, Challenge Me, Emote Me (ACE)

[Jill] I don’t know what happened. [Chris] Barry. Where’s Barry? So opens the mansion scene to Capcom’s survival-horror Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996) – and with it one of the gaming world’s first tentative steps toward realisation of the emotionally-immersive, narrative cinematic experience. In this paper we describe the fundamentals of affective gaming; covering their origins, how they operate, some examples, an-in-depth analysis of one of our early affective games (Gilleade & Allanson, 2002), their current capabilities and the ongoing research to develop them further. We also explore a new approach to game design based on three high-level design heuristics: assist me, challenge me and emote me (ACE), a series of gameplay "tweaks" made possible through affective videogames. We are emotionally-creatures. If affect is not conveyed properly during game play (e.g. if Resident Evil’s ability to inspire fear in the player was non-existent), the player’s suspension of disbelief can be negatively affected and the movie-inspired immersive experience is spoiled. Advances in computation and memory capabilities mean that videogames are more than capable of conveying affect just as well as traditional media (e.g. film, books). As a result games are becoming more reliant on the imagination of game designers for their affective material rather than the constraints of the currently available technology. But the interactive nature of the videogame allows us to go one step further than traditional media. Unlike the latter; videogames are dynamic entities, they change according to how the player interacts with them. At the moment, these interactions are based purely on the input the player consciously decides to use in the game world (i.e. actions executed through the game controller). However these actions are not the only thing going on with the player during play; there are also the mostly unseen physiological responses that go on within the player’s body. Such responses are useful in identifying the current emotional state the player is in. If this information could be somehow collected and invested in the game dynamics; the affective bandwidth of future games could be increased (i.e. bi-directional, game affects player, player affects game and so on) allowing for the emotive "tweaking" of conventional gaming experiences or the creation of whole new ones. There are two ways in which physiological responses have been used in gaming so far. The most obvious are biofeedback games (sometimes referred to as affective feedback) such as the Media Lab relax-to-win racing game (Bersak et al, 2001); where players consciously try to control their biological responses of which they are not normally consciously aware (e.g. heartbeat, skin response, blood pressure). Such games use biological sensors to influence game play, thus the player effectively controls the game via their control of their own internal bodily functions. A variant of this is the skin-response based videogame created by Future University-Hakodate (Sakurazawa et al, 2004) where onlookers attempt to influence the physiological state of the player (i.e. provoking flight or fight responses through loud noises such as clapping) which then affects the game play (i.e. makes its more difficult, the player would attempt to exert conscious control over their biological responses to avoid getting into further difficulty). The other use of physiological data is for truly affective gaming, a derivation of Affective Computing (Picard, 1997). These games use the player’s own physiology to assess their current emotional state; this information is then used to manipulate gameplay in some prescribed manner in order to create more engaging and / or immersive entertainment experiences. The player may not even be aware that their physiological state is being sensed, the intention is to capture their normal affective reactions. In previous work on affective games (Gilleade & Allanson); we used the player’s heart rate to control the difficulty of a conventional videogame. Whenever game play was deemed too boring or overly exciting (i.e. represented as a decrease or increase in heartbeat rate respectively) the videogame would alter play to reverse the player’s affective state to keep within an optimum range. In the full paper we will describe these two classes in more detail and also introduce a more complete classification and discussion of affective gaming. Based on this analysis of other affective games and our own experience of the design of affective games, we propose several high level design heuristics for affective gaming, which we will explore further in the paper: • Assist me: Games that; identify player frustrations to which the game offers assistance through the current gaming context. • Challenge me: Games that; identify the player’s state of enjoyment in relation to the current challenge being offered to which the game compensates for if the challenge is to be found lacking. • Emote me: Games that; identify player responses to intentional emotional provoking content to which the game manipulates subsequent related content in respect to the recorded response. References: ----------- Gilleade, K., Allanson, J. (2003). A Toolkit for Exploring Affective Interface Adaptation in Videogames. Proceeding of HCI International 2003, volume 2. LEA, New Jersey, pages 370-374. Bersak, D., McDarby, G., Augenblick, N., McDarby, P., McDonnell, D., McDonal, B., Karkun, R. Biofeedback using an Immersive Competitive Environment. Online Proceedings for the Designing Ubiquitous Computing Games Workshop, Ubicomp 2001. Sakurazawa, S., Yoshida, N., Munekata, N. (2004). Entertainment Feature of a Game Using Skin Conductance Response. Proceedings of ACE 2004, Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, ACM Press, pages 181-186. Picard, R. Affective Computing. MIT Press (1997)

Dark Lancaster

In this position paper we'll outline a few ongoing and planned projects at Lancaster that are not all sweetness and light. In some we are interested in some of the darker aspects of human nature: frustration when things go wrong in order to design games with the right emotional impact; and anger of those seeking jobs in order to help train those who need to defuse fraught situations. In others we deliberately seek to design ‘bad’ situations; obviously this is necessary to study issues like frustration, but also we design bad things in order to understand what is good! Finally, there are times when good is dark and the bright light of day needs to be shrouded just a little

A framework for P2P application development

Although Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing has become increasingly popular over recent years, there still exist only a very small number of application domains that have exploited it on a large scale. This can be attributed to a number of reasons including the rapid evolution of P2P technologies, coupled with their often-complex nature. This paper describes an implemented abstraction framework that seeks to aid developers in building P2P applications. A selection of example P2P applications that have been developed using this framework are also presented

Applications and Issues for Physiological Computing Systems: An Introduction to the Special Issue

The prospect of connecting the brain and body to a technological device can elicit a broad range of responses from potential users. Early adopters are thrilled by the possibility of a device that can interface directly to the human nervous system. For the vast majority, interest is tempered by caution, as nascent varieties of physiological computing systems raise as many questions as answers about how we will interact with computers in the future

A Framework for Psychophysiological Classification within a Cultural Heritage Context Using Interest

This article presents a psychophysiological construct of interest as a knowledge emotion and illustrates the importance of interest detection in a cultural heritage context. The objective of this work is to measure and classify psychophysiological reactivity in response to cultural heritage material presented as visual and audio. We present a data processing and classification framework for the classification of interest. Two studies are reported, adopting a subject-dependent approach to classify psychophysiological signals using mobile physiological sensors and the support vector machine learning algorithm. The results show that it is possible to reliably infer a state of interest from cultural heritage material using psychophysiological feature data and a machine learning approach, informing future work for the development of a real-time physiological computing system for use within an adaptive cultural heritage experience designed to adapt the provision of information to sustain the interest of the visitor