2011 - International Workshop on Emotion in Games

Emotion in Games

Capturing, analyzing and synthesizing player experience in both traditional screen-based games and augmented- and mixed-reality platforms has been a challenging area within the crossroads of cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Additional gameplay input modalities such as 3D acceleration (e.g. Nintendo Wii and smartphones), image and speech (e.g. Microsoft Kinect) enhance the importance of the study and the complexity of player experience. Sophisticated techniques from artificial and computational intelligence can be used to recognize the affective state of player, based on multiple modalities of player-game interaction, and to model emotion in non-playing characters. Multiple modalities of input can also provide a novel means for game platforms to measure player satisfaction and engagement when playing, without necessarily having to resort to post-experience and off-line questionnaires. For instance, players immersed by gameplay will rarely gaze away from the screen, while disappointed or indifferent players will typically show very little response or emotion. Adaptation game techniques can also be used to maximise player’s experience, thereby, closing the affective game loop: e.g. change the game soundtrack to a vivid or dimmer tune to match the player’s powerful stance or prospect of defeat; from the point of view of non-player characters, an injured or frustrated opponent will look down when facing defeat, informing the users about its status, much in the way a human opponent would be expected to. In addition to this, procedural content generation techniques may be employed, based on the level of user engagement and interest, to dynamically produce new, adaptable and personalised content (e.g. a new level in a platform game, which poses enough challenge to players, without disappointing them).

This workshop is the first of its series in ACII and build on related workshops and special sessions in other venues, such as the Simulation of Adaptive Behaviour (SAB) 2006 and Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) 2007 workshops and the IEEE Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG) 2008 special session on player satisfaction, the special session on Emotion in Games in IEEE CIG 2010 and VS Games 2011 and the Networking Session on Research and Development on Serious Games during the ICT Event 2010 and tutorials on 'affective computing in game design' at Gameon-NA 2008 and at DigiPen (2009).

Website: http://www.image.ece.ntua.gr/events/acii-emotion-i...

Organizers:
Georgios Yannakakis, IT University, Denmark
Ana Paiva, Instituto Superior Técnico/INESC-ID, Portugal
Kostas Karpouzis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Eva Hudlicka, Psychometrix Associates, Inc., USA