Designing players' emotional reaction models: A generic method towards adaptive affective gaming

Current approaches to game design improvements rely on gameplay testing, an iterative process following the test, try and fix pattern, relying on target audience feedback via standard questionnaires. Besides being a very time consuming phase, it is also highly subjective. In this paper, we demonstrate a generalizable approach for building predictive models of players' affective reactions across games and genres. Our aim is two-fold: 1) That game developers can use these models to more easily and accurately tune game parameters, allowing improved gaming experiences, and 2) That these models can be used as the basis for parameterisable and adaptive affective gaming. This paper describes our preliminary results regarding a novel, physiological-based method for emotional player profiling, which consists on the following three phases: (i) monitoring players' emotional states and game events, (ii) identifying player's emotional reactions to game events and (iii) individual and cluster-based modelling of players emotional reactions.