IEEE CIG Special Session: Emotion in Games - Sensing and inducing player experience and affect - CALL FOR PAPERS

Special Session Description:

The traditional gameplay practice of juggling an arcade joystick and two push-buttons has been progressively replaced by an intuitive experience offered by hand-held controllers like Nintendo's WiiMote and Nunchuk, Sony's PlayStation Motion Controller or Activision''s RIDE skateboard and emerging platforms implementing computer vision, speech analysis algorithms (Microsoft Project Natal) and embedding physiological sensors (Wii Vitality Sensor) to offer facial expression, hand and body gesture tracking, and biofeedback analysis. As a result, players can interact with the game characters and environment in new ways, using non-verbal cues; e.g. smiling or gloating when they win or shouting in desperation in the sight of a fleet of enemies.

Analyzing, capturing and synthesizing player experience in both traditional screen-based games and augmented- and mixed-reality platforms has been a challenging area within the crossroads of cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. New gameplay modalities enhance the importance of the study and the complexity of player experience. Artificial and computational intelligence can be used to synthesize the affective state of player (and non-player) characters, based on multiple modalities of player-game interaction. Multiple modalities of input can also provide a novel means for game platforms to measure player satisfaction and engagement when playing, without necessarily having to resort to post-play and off-line questionnaires. For instance, players immersed by gameplay will rarely gaze away from the screen, while disappointed or indifferent players will typically show very little response or emotion. AI/CI algorithms can also be used to adapt the game to maximize player's experience, thereby, closing the affective game loop: e.g. change the game soundtrack to a vivid or dimmer tune to match the player's powerful stance or prospect of defeat; maximize frustration by increasing the number of gaps in a platform game. From the point of view of non-player characters, an injured or frustrated opponent will look down when facing defeat, informing the users about its status, much in the way a human opponent would be expected to.

This special session aims at bringing together specialists from computational intelligence, affective computing, and multi-modal interfaces to discuss advances in player experience and affect induction, sensing and modeling.

Research areas relevant to the special session include, but are not limited to, the following:

• artificial and computational intelligence for modeling player experience
• cognitive/affective models of player satisfaction
• analysis of player's facial expressions, hand and body gestures, body stance, gaze and physiology
• speech recognition and prosody analysis of players
• mapping low-level cues to affect and emotion
• reproducing player affect in the game environment
• adapting to player affect/player experience
• optimizing/adapting to player satisfaction
• mapping non-verbal cues to player satisfaction
• adaptive learning and player experience

Session Organizers:
Kostas Karpouzis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Tom Ziemke, University of Skovde, Sweden
Georgios N. Yannakakis, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark