Towards player’s affective and behavioral visual cues as drives to game adaptation

Abstract

Recent advances in emotion and affect recognition can play a crucial role in game technology. Moving from the typical game controls to controls generated from free gestures is already in the market. Higher level controls, however, can also be motivated by player’s affective and cognitive behavior itself, during gameplay. In this paper, we explore player’s behavior, as captured by computer vision techniques, and player’s details regarding his own experience and profile. The objective of the current research is game adaptation aiming at maximizing player enjoyment. To this aim, the ability to infer player engagement and frustration, along with the degree of challenge imposed by the game is explored. The estimated levels of the induced metrics can feed an engine’s artificial intelligence, allowing for game adaptation.