Players’ Opinions on Control and Playability of a BCI Game

Abstract

Brain-computer interface (BCI) games can satisfy our need for competence by providing us with challenges that we should enjoy tackling. However, many BCI games that claim to provide enjoyable challenges fail to do so. Some common fallacies and pitfalls about BCI games play a role in this failure and in this paper we report on a study that we carried out to empirically investigate them. More specifically, we explored (1) active and passive interaction with BCI games, (2) BCI gaming as a skill and (3) playability of a BCI game. We conducted an experiment with 42 participants who played a popular computer game called World of Warcraft using a commercial BCI headset called EPOC. We conducted interviews about the participants' experiences of the game and ran a phenomenological analysis on their responses. The analysis results showed that (1) the players would like to play a BCI game actively if the BCI controls critical game elements, (2) the technical challenges of BCI cannot motivate the players to play a BCI game and (3) the players' enjoyment of one-time playing of a BCI game does not imply playability of the game.