An analysis of player affect transitions in survival horror games

Abstract

The trend of multimodal interaction in interactive gaming has grown significantly as demonstrated for example by the wide acceptance of the Wii Remote and the Kinect as tools not just for commercial games but for game research as well. Furthermore, using the player’s affective state as an additional input for game manipulation has opened the realm of affective gaming. In this paper, we analyzed the affective states of players prior to and after witnessing a scary event in a survival horror game. Player affect data were collected through our own affect annotation tool that allows the player to report his affect labels while watching his recorded gameplay and facial expressions. The affect data were then used for training prediction models with the player’s brainwave and heart rate signals, as well as keyboard–mouse activities collected during gameplay. Our results show that (i) players are likely to get more fearful of a scary event when they are in the suspense state and that (ii) heart rate is a good candidate for detecting player affect. Using our results, game designers can maximize the fear level of the player by slowly building tension until the suspense state and showing a scary event after that. We believe that this approach can be applied to the analyses of different sets of emotions in other games as well.