Simple games – complex emotions: Automated affect detection using physiological signals

Abstract

Understanding the impact of interaction mechanics on the user’s emotional state can aid in shaping the user experience. For eliciting the emotional state of a user, designers and researchers typically employ subjective or expert assessment. Yet these methods are typically applied after the user has finished the interaction, causing a delay between stimulus and assessment. Physiological measures potentially offer more reliable indication of a user’s affective state in real-time. We present an experiment to increase our understanding of the relation of certain stimuli and valence of induced emotions in games. For this we designed a simple game to induce negative and positive emotions in the player. The results show a high correspondence between our classification of participants’ physiological signals and subjective assessment. However, creating a clear causality between game elements and emotions is a daunting task, and our designs offer room for improvement.