Affective Gaming: A Comprehensive Survey

A typical gaming scenario involves a player interacting with a game by a specialized input device, such as a joystic, a mouse, a keyboard etc. Recent technological advances have enabled the introduction of more elaborated approaches in which the player is able to interact with the game using his/her body pose, facial expressions, actions, even his physiological signals (heart beat rate, encephalogram, skin conductivity etc). The future lies in 'affective gaming', that is games that will be 'intelligent' enough not only to extract the player's commands by his speech and gestures but also by his behavioral cues, and his/her emotional states and adjust their game plot accordingly, in order to ensure more realistic and satisfactory gameplay experience. In this paper, we review the area of affective gaming by describing existing approaches and discussing recent technological advances. We elaborate on different sources of affect information and summarize the existing commercial affective gaming applications. We proceed with outlining some of the most important problems that have to be tackled in order to create more realistic and efficient interactions between players and games and conclude by high-lighting the challenges such systems must overcome.