Abstract
Game science has become a research field, which attracts industry attention due to a worldwide rich sell-market. To understand the player experience, concepts like flow or boredom mental states require formalization and empirical investigation, taking advantage of the objective data that psychophysiological methods like electroencephalography (EEG) can provide. This work studies the affective ludology and shows two different game levels for Neverwinter Nights 2 developed with the aim to manipulate emotions; two sets of affective design guidelines are presented, with a rigorous formalization that considers the characteristics of role-playing genre and its specific gameplay. An empirical investigation with a brain---computer interface headset has been conducted: by extracting numerical data features, machine learning techniques classify the different activities of the gaming sessions (task and events) to verify if their design differentiation coincides with the affective one. The observed results, also supported by subjective questionnaires data, confirm the goodness of the proposed guidelines, suggesting that this evaluation methodology could be extended to other evaluation tasks.
Highlights
IntroductionThe concept of playing is strictly linked to our lives, one of the first activities that a human experiences by discovering his surrounding world: a successful method to learn rules or how to safely execute a task is “gamify”, i.e. to see them like a gaming activity from which gaining experience for future goals [1]; this is the basis of gamification and serious gaming theories which try to introduce playful aspects, often borrowed by videogame creators, in all daily interactive activities
The concept of playing is strictly linked to our lives, one of the first activities that a human experiences by discovering his surrounding world: a successful method to learn rules or how to safely execute a task is “gamify”, i.e. to see them like a gaming activity from which gaining experience for future goals [1]; this is the basis of gamification and serious gaming theories which try to introduce playful aspects, often borrowed by videogame creators, in all daily interactive activities.Lindley [2] provides a commonly accepted definition of game as “a goal-directed and competitive activity conducted within a framework of agreed rules”
This paper describes how to apply affective level design and the manipulation of emotions in digital Role-Playing Games by designing activities in a game level; a novel evaluation methodology is proposed, to extract and analyze objective data from affective states and use them to uniquely connote the activities and the game level areas formally developed
Summary
The concept of playing is strictly linked to our lives, one of the first activities that a human experiences by discovering his surrounding world: a successful method to learn rules or how to safely execute a task is “gamify”, i.e. to see them like a gaming activity from which gaining experience for future goals [1]; this is the basis of gamification and serious gaming theories which try to introduce playful aspects, often borrowed by videogame creators, in all daily interactive activities. Lindley [2] provides a commonly accepted definition of game as “a goal-directed and competitive activity conducted within a framework of agreed rules”. Given this definition, it is often said that “to play” involves learning the internal rules of a game, i.e. the set of mechanics that characterize its interactive dynamics and denote each game genre (known as “gameplay”). The academic world considers videogaming as a multidisciplinary research [8] and teaching field [9]
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