A review of the use of psychophysiological methods in game research

Kivikangas, J. Matias; Chanel, Guillaume; Cowley, Benjamin Ultan; Ekman, Inger; Salminen, Matti; Järvelä, Sanna; Ravaja, Niklas

doi:10.1386/jgvw.3.3.181_1

Cited by 220 publications

(172 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…Kivikangas et al (2011) reviews a comprehensive list of references in the area of psychophysiological methods for game research. They emphasise that a commonly accepted theory for game experience does not currently exist with game researchers frequently using theoretical frameworks from other fields of study.…”

Section: Physiological User Modellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive user modelling in car racing games using behavioural and physiological data

Georgiou

Demiris

2017

User Model User-Adap Inter

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Personalised content adaptation has great potential to increase user engagement in video games. Procedural generation of user-tailored content increases the self-motivation of players as they immerse themselves in the virtual world. An adaptive user model is needed to capture the skills of the player and enable automatic game content altering algorithms to fit the individual user. We propose an adaptive user modelling approach using a combination of unobtrusive physiological data to identify strengths and weaknesses in user performance in car racing games. Our system creates user-tailored tracks to improve driving habits and user experience, and to keep engagement at high levels. The user modelling approach adopts concepts from the Trace Theory framework; it uses machine learning to extract features from the user's physiological data and game-related actions, and cluster them into low level primitives. These primitives are transformed and evaluated into higher level abstractions such as experience, exploration and attention. These abstractions are subsequently used to provide track alteration decisions for the player. Collection of data and feedback from 52 users allowed us to associate key model variables and outcomes to user responses, and to verify that the model provides statistically significant decisions personalised to the individual player. Tailored game content variations between users in our experiments, as well as the correlations with user satisfaction demonstrate that our algorithm is able to automatically incorporate user feedback in subsequent procedural content generation.

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Section: Physiological User Modellingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive user modelling in car racing games using behavioural and physiological data

Georgiou

Demiris

2017

User Model User-Adap Inter

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“…Most of them used immersion questionnaire [1,2,[22][23][24]. Some others employed psychological instrument [23,25,26], behavior during gameplay [27,28] and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) [29] to detect players' immersion level.…”

Section: The Measurements Of Immersionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Influence of Background Music of Video Games on Immersion

Fu¹

2015

J Psychol Psychother

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The background music has been proved to be an indispensable part in every successful video game. At the same time, all the video game designers and players hope video games could be as immersive as possible. Present research aimed to make an investigation about the role of video games background music in the influence of players' subjective immersion. Eighty participants were employed according to their game experience to join the experiment. All of them were assigned in pairs to finish a same video game synchronously with local area network. One was with earphone while the other not. After 20 minutes' gameplay, they needed to complete three missions (questionnaire, task after game and time distortion) with the purpose of detecting their immersion during video game. The results showed that the participants with background music got significant higher scores from questionnaire, performed worse in after-game task and expressed more serious time distortion than those participants without hearing background music. But these changes just happened to low gamers in the questionnaire and time distortion. Besides, correlations were made to find that only the questionnaire scores and time distortion were significantly related. These results of present research showed that background music did increase participants' immersion. But this improvement was likely just happened in low gamers.

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“…More recently, with the establishment of the new field of Affective Games [9,10], research on detecting affect in computer game players is rapidly growing in several directions including psychophysiology [11]. Generally, these studies apply the concepts and methodologies of traditional psychophysiology [12] to analyse the effect of different game aspects such as social experiences (e.g.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generic Physiological Features as Predictors of Player Experience

Martínez

Garbarino

Yannakakis

2011

Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction

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Abstract. 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 selfreported 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.

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A review of the use of psychophysiological methods in game research

Cited by 220 publications

References 75 publications

Adaptive user modelling in car racing games using behavioural and physiological data

Adaptive user modelling in car racing games using behavioural and physiological data

The Influence of Background Music of Video Games on Immersion

Generic Physiological Features as Predictors of Player Experience

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