Articles:Using Biometric Measurement to Help Develop Emotionally Compelling Games
From unthinkMedia
"The emersion of enjoyment isn't just positive emotion...the build up of tension and negative emotion, followed by positive emotional spikes."
The act of shifting a players emotional state is what makes a game compelling.
Contents |
The Nature of Emotion
Two overall emotional/motivational dimensions
positive:
- joy
- pleasure
- love
- interest
- hope
- etc.
- energy
- immersion
- engagement
negative:
- fear
- sadness
- anger
- etc.
- stress
- tension
Emotional Coordinates
Challenges
If you interrupt a players game play to ask them how they feel, you may alter their experience and feeling.
Goals
- provide differing emotional profile for game
Measuring Emotion
Many techniques, such as think aloud, interfere with the players experience. Video taping is used with retrospective think aloud
Verbal report not so informative about moment to moment emotional experience.
Children have less developed cognitive and language ability making them less able to express their feelings.
Arousal Measure
reflects autonomic nervous system activities
- hear rate was able to measure at 6+ seconds post stimulus.
Measuring Valance
Paul Ekman has identified a configuration of facial muscle movements that express a specific emotion. This is called Facial Action Coding System (FACS), which codes "observable" muscle movement.
The problem is that mild to moderate emotion is often no observable. This is achievable by using EMG.
Levels of emotion could be measured by increased smiling.
EMG
- Best physiologic measure for tracking emotional valence
- More quantitative then more approaches
"...people soon forget them as they get involved in the game, just like the test subject forget about the one way mirror."
typically filtered to only allow 30hz to 500hz. Reacher often use 60 hz notch filter to block out AC line interference.
Data logs could get very large: could you an intergrator
Games and Emotional Profiles
When comparing different game genre we could make inferences on each of their emotional profiles. So a racing games profile would be substantially different the RPG.
How: Count # of seconds that the 2 emotional traces are at least one standard deviation of their mean
Note: If we test the reaction to a series of visual or auditory events, make sure the orders vary so there is no order effect in testing result.
Application
- Test individual elements
- Measure the state of a player in order to keep them their emotions at an optimal range.
- Measuring the intensity of positive emotional bursts associated w/ fun
- Comparisons amongst games and mini games.
