On a first date, couples
scrutinize each other’s facial expressions for a clue as to whether the date
will turn into a long-term relationship. Game publishers and designers might
start doing the same thing. By analyzing the movements of gamers’ smile and frown
muscles in the first 45 minutes of play, Taiwanese researchers have found a way
to predict a game’s addictiveness. The online gaming industry sees a game that
is played by a large number of fanatics and survives more than two years as a
success. But that success comes at a cost. According to researchers, more than
200 online games are released each year, globally. The cost of developing a
game, jointly brainstormed by dozens of designers, ranges from less than $1
million to as much as $200 million. However, the humbling fact is that most
games survive only four to nine months. It’s difficult to evaluate an online
game’s addictiveness prior to the release. The gaming industry’s approach is
simply based on designers’ intuition and experience and the feedback from focus
groups, the latter of which could be limited and biased. Researchers at the
institute and at the electrical engineering department of National Taiwan
University, aims to help game publishers avoid risky or blind investments.
Using archival game data and dozens of electromyography (EMG) experiments, they
constructed a forecasting model that predicts a game’s ability to retain active
players for a long time.
Researchers had to sort out the
relationship between the data from laboratory emotion studies and a game’s
market performance during the first six months after its release. By analyzing
account activity records of 11 games—five role-playing games, four action
games, and two first-person shooter games—they produced a general addictiveness
index. They came up with an index that takes into account things like how
quickly players’ frequency of participation decreases during the subscription
period in which the gamer actually played the game and found that the index
correlated well with key measures of a game’s success (i.e. user focus group
responses and the length of time players spent playing a game). Researchers
connected electrodes to 84 gamers, ages 19 to 34. The electrodes were set up to
measure the electrical potentials generated by two facial muscles—the
corrugator supercilii, or frowning muscle, whose motion primarily produces the
appearance of suffering and unhappiness, and the zygomaticus major muscle,
which is used in smiling and laughing. These facial EMG measurements were conducted
for 45 minutes as players explored new games for the first time. Each of the
subjects played as many as 3 new games and researchers gathered 155 hours of
facial-expression data and were able to discern positive and negative emotions.
Analyzing those two separately and in combination, they were able to predict
the games’ addictiveness index to within an average of 11 percent.
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