This report was written before my thesis to study the uses of physiological measurements in computer games.

The full title is: The use of physiological measurements to assess user involvement in computer games

Summary

I study how physiological measures can be used to improve user experience in computer games. For this I find that playing a computer game can be combined with the theory of flow, coined by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi. The theory of flow states that when a person is in flow, they lose track of time and is completely absorbed in the task at hand. To keep a gamer in the flow state, a tool called dynamic difficulty adjustment can be used. Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) adjusts the game difficulty dynamically by evaluating the player performance. The idea is to adjust the difficulty by using the emotional state of the player.

For recognizing emotions, two theories are often stated. The dimensional theory of emotion and the discrete emotion theory. The dimensional theory of emotion states that all emotions can be mapped onto a dimensions of valence and arousal while the discrete emotion theory states that there are a certain basic emotions. The use of dimensional theory of emotion is selected due to certain physiological measures correlate with arousal or valence.

The usage of physiological signals are also compared. EEG studies in emotion show results that are on average 13 percentage points better than chance level while physiological measures such as galvanic skin response, heart rate and temperature are on average 44.4 percentage points better than chance level.

In conclusion physiological measures such as galvanic skin response, heart rate and temperature are selected along with the dimensional theory of emotion to provide feedback to the DDA system in computer games. This should lead to games that alter themselves according to the gamer’s emotional state.

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