An Affect-Aware Game Adapting to Human Emotion

The vision of affect-aware video games outlines games that can dynamically react to the emotion of the player. In this paper, we designed and developed a game that incorporates an emotion recognition system that follows this principle, aiming at adapting gameplay elements based on the player’s current emotion. The game’s design employs the user’s emotion as an implicit form of input method (in contrast to explicit methods in other works) by adjusting multiple in-game parameters ranging from more easily distinguishable such as audio and visual changes to more subtle such as journal entries, emotionally themed hints/presentation, and ending quotes. An exploratory study aimed at exploring the viability of the system with 22 participants showed promising results regarding game satisfaction while also indicating that the game achieved its design goal of utilizing user emotion as an implicit input method. Finally, results suggest that visual and audio changes were the most easily perceived by the users, with other changes being less noticeable.