Induction of Emotional States in Educational Video Games Through a Fuzzy Control System

Abstract

It has been shown that the emotional state of students plays an important role towards learning; for instance, engaged concentration is positively correlated with learning. This paper proposes Inductive Control (IC) for educational games. Unlike conventional approaches that only modify the game level, the proposed technique also induces emotions in the player for supporting the learning process. This paper explores a fuzzy system that analyzes the players’ performance and their emotional state for controlling the level and aesthetic content of an educational video game. The emotional state of the player is recognized through voice analysis. A total of 40 subjects played a video game designed to practice basic math skills; for each trial, a student plays twice in a row the same game but each time the game was controlled by one of the two approaches—Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) and IC, the playing order was assigned randomly. Results show that when the proposed approach is used the participants changed faster from unpleasant–low to pleasant or high emotions. These experiments demonstrate that the inductive control technique improves the learning effectiveness through detection and stimulation of positive emotions.