Emotional Video Gaming

As you wake up, you realise that your building is on fire. Your heart starts pounding and the flames grow higher, but you manage to compose yourself, and as you do so the fire dies down. Smashing a window, you step outside, only to find yourself on a ledge six storeys up. As you break out into a terrified sweat, the perilous route to safety appears to shift nightmarishly before your eyes. Will you escape? Scenarios like this could soon be played out harmlessly in living rooms across the world. That's because the next generation of video game controllers will use players' emotional and physiological states to help shape and navigate their virtual worlds. This style of affective gaming aims to move video games to a new level, way beyond what is available even via motion-based controllers like the Wiimote or Kinect.

Valve Software, the developer behind titles such as Half-Life, sees a player's emotional state as an important part of any game. Researchers have been working with Valve on ways to add emotional feedback to Left 4 Dead 2, a game in which players cooperate to fight off a zombie horde. They spoke about Their work at this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. In the regular form of the game, an "AI Director" responds to players' actions by adjusting the game itself. Play well and you'll face tougher opponents; play badly and the game becomes less intense. They are trying to go beyond this rough-and-ready response to the players' behaviour by assessing their emotional state more directly. By recording the physiological responses of our play testers, we can get more precise estimations of their emotional state.

More information:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21028084.700-emotional-video-gaming-makes-the-action-real.html