Craig A. Lindley

Flow and immersion in first-person shooters: measuring the player's gameplay experience

Researching experiential phenomena is a challenging undertaking, given the sheer variety of experiences that are described by gamers and missing a formal taxonomy: flow, immersion, boredom, excitement, challenge, and fun. These informal terms require scientific explanation, which amounts to providing measurable criteria for different experiential states. This paper reports the results of an experimental psychophysiological study investigating different traits of gameplay experience using subjective and objective measures. Participants played three Half-Life 2 game modifications while being measured with electroencephalography, electrocardiography, electromyography, galvanic skin response and eye tracking equipment. In addition, questionnaire responses were collected after each play session. A level designed for combat-oriented flow experience demonstrated measurable high-arousal positive affect emotions. The positive correlation between subjective and objective indicators of gameplay experience shows the great potential of the method presented here for providing real-time emotional profiles of gameplay that may be correlated with self-reported subjective descriptions.

More than a feeling: Measurement of sonic user experience and psychophysiology in a first-person shooter game

The combination of psychophysiological and psychometric methods provides reliable measurements of affective user experience (UX). Understanding the nature of affective UX in interactive entertainment, especially with a focus on sonic stimuli, is an ongoing research challenge. In the empirical study reported here, participants played a fast-paced, immersive first-person shooter (FPS) game modification, in which sound (on/off) and music (on/off) were manipulated, while psychophysiological recordings of electrodermal activity (EDA) and facial muscle activity (EMG) were recorded in addition to a Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ). Results indicate no main or interaction effects of sound or music on EMG and EDA. However, a significant main effect of sound on all GEQ dimensions (immersion, tension, competence, flow, negative affect, positive affect, and challenge) was found. In addition, an interaction effect of sound and music on GEQ dimension tension and flow indicates an important relationship of sound and music for gameplay experience. Additionally, we report the results of a correlation between GEQ dimensions and EMG/EDA activity. We conclude subjective measures could advance our understanding of sonic UX in digital games, while affective tonic (i.e., long-term psychophysiological) measures of sonic UX in digital games did not yield statistically significant results. One approach for future affective psychophysiological measures of sonic UX could be experiments investigating phasic (i.e., event-related) psychophysiological measures of sonic gameplay elements in digital games. This could improve our general understanding of sonic UX beyond affective gaming evaluation.

Electroencephalographic Assessment of Player Experience: A Pilot Study in Affective Ludology

Psychophysiological methods, such as electroencephalography (EEG), provide reliable high-resolution measurements of affective player experience. In this article, the authors present a psychophysiological pilot study and its initial results to solidify a research approach they call affective ludology, a research area concerned with the physiological measurement of affective responses to player-game interaction. The study investigates the impact of level design on brainwave activity measured with EEG and on player experience measured with questionnaires. The goal of the study was to investigate cognition, emotion, and player behavior from a psychological perspective. For this purpose, a methodology for assessing gameplay experience with subjective and objective measures was developed extending prior work in physiological measurements of affect in digital gameplay. The authors report the result of this pilot study, the impact of three different level design conditions (boredom, immersion, and flow) on EEG, and subjective indicators of gameplay experience. Results from the subjective gameplay experience questionnaire support the validity of our level design hypotheses. Patterns of EEG spectral power show that the immersion-level design elicits more activity in the theta band, which may support a relationship between virtual spatial navigation or exploration and theta activity. The research shows that facets of gameplay experience can be assessed with affective ludology measures, such as EEG, in which cognitive and affective patterns emerge from different level designs.

Log Who's Playing: Psychophysiological Game Analysis Made Easy through Event Logging

Modern psychophysiological game research faces the problem that for understanding the computer game experience, it needs to analyze game events with high temporal resolution and within the game context. This is the only way to achieve greater understanding of gameplay and the player experience with the use of psychophysiological instrumentation. This paper presents a solution to recording in-game events with the frequency and accuracy of psychophysiological recording systems, by sending out event byte codes through a parallel port to the psychophysiological signal acquisition hardware. Thus, psychophysiological data can immediately be correlated with in-game data. By employing this system for psychophysiological game experiments, researchers will be able to analyze gameplay in greater detail in future studies.

Brain training for silver gamers: effects of age and game form on effectiveness, efficiency, self-assessment, and gameplay experience.

In recent years, an aging demographic majority in the Western world has come to the attention of the game industry. The recently released brain-training games target this population, and research investigating gameplay experience of the elderly using this game form is lacking. This study employs a 2 x 2 mixed factorial design (age group: young and old x game form: paper and Nintendo DS) to investigate effects of age and game form on usability, self-assessment, and gameplay experience in a supervised field study. Effectiveness was evaluated in task completion time, efficiency as error rate, together with self-assessment measures (arousal, pleasure, dominance) and game experience (challenge, flow, competence, tension, positive and negative affect). Results indicate players, regardless of age, are more effective and efficient using pen-and-paper than using a Nintendo DS console. However, the game is more arousing and induces a heightened sense of flow in digital form for gamers of all ages. Logic problem-solving challenges within digital games may be associated with positive feelings for the elderly but with negative feelings for the young. Thus, digital logic-training games may provide positive gameplay experience for an aging Western civilization.

An Investigation of Visual Attention in FPS Computer Gameplay

Cognitive science provides a useful approach to studying computer gameplay, especially from the perspective of determining the cognitive skills that players learn during play. Computer games are highly visual medium and game interaction involves continuous visual cognition. A system integrating an eyetracker with a 3D computer game engine has been developed to provide real time gaze object logging, a fast and convenient way of collecting gaze object data for analysis. This system has been used to test three hypotheses concerning visual attention in close combat tactics as simulated by a first-person shooter (FPS) computer game. Firstly, the cuing effect of the player’s gun graphic on visual attention was tested, but no evidence was found to support this. Data supported the second hypothesis, that a player attends to the target opponent while shooting at them, in most cases, while in a small percentage of cases this is achieved in peripheral vision. Finally, in most cases, a player targets the nearest opponent. These results provide a baseline for further investigations in which the stimulus game design may be modified to provide more detailed models of the visual cognitive processes involved in gameplay. These models document the learning outcomes of game interaction and provide a basis for improvements, such as the optimization of combat survival tactics.

A Biofeedback Game for Training Arousal Regulation during a Stressful Task: The Space Investor

Emotion regulation is a topic that has considerable impact in our everyday lives, among others emotional biases that affect our decision making. A serious game that was built in order to be able to train emotion regulation is presented and evaluated here. The evaluation consisted of a usability testing and then an experiment that targeted the difficulty of the game. The results suggested adequate usability and a difficulty that requires the player to engage in managing their emotion in order to have a winning strategy.

Real Time Eye Gaze Logging in a 3D Game/Simulation World

Evaluating the effectiveness of virtual environments as training and analysis systems one must take into account both strongly and weakly defined measures of visual behaviour and associated experience. The investigation of cross correlations between strongly defined measures of logged gaze behaviours, and weakly defined measures of subjective perceptions of visual behaviour, reveals significant discrepancies. The existence of these discrepancies casts doubt upon the effectiveness of using self-reporting questionnaires to assess training effectiveness. However, making participants aware of these discrepancies can be a potentially powerful method for increasing the effectiveness of training using virtual worlds.

Multi-Cue Based Place Learning for Mobile Robot Navigation

Place recognition is important navigation ability for autonomous navigation of mobile robots. Visual cues extracted from images provide a way to represent and recognize visited places. In this article, a multi-cue based place learning algorithm is proposed. The algorithm has been evaluated on a localization image database containing different variations of scenes under different weather conditions taken by moving the robot-mounted camera in an indoor-environment. The results suggest that joining the features obtained from different cues provide better representation than using a single feature cue.

Synthetic Intelligence: Beyond Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

The development of engineered systems having properties of autonomy and intelligence has been a visionary research goal of the twentieth century. However, there are a number of persistent and fundamental problems that continue to frustrate this goal. Behind these problems is an outmoded industrial foundation for the contemporary discourse and practices addressing intelligent robotics that must be superseded as engineering progresses more deeply into molecular and biological modalities. These developments inspire the proposal of a paradigm of engineered synthetic intelligence as an alternative to artificial intelligence, in which intelligence is pursued in a bottom-up way from systems of molecular and cellular elements, designed and fabricated from the molecular level and up. This paradigm no longer emphasizes the definition of representation and the logic of cognitive operations. Rather, it emphasizes the design of self-replicating, self-assembling and self-organizing biomolecular elements capable of generating cognizing systems as larger scale assemblies, analogous to the neurobiological system manifesting human cognition.