Promoting Emotional Well-Being with Angry-Birds-like Gameplay on Pixel Image Levels

This paper describes the use of “Real Pixel Image Level Generator (RPILG)” along with a design of game control, called “enhancing play with smiling” to promote the players' emotion. Our study is conducted on Science Birds, an Angry-Birds-like game. RPILG is a procedural content generation method that generates game levels with the appearance of a pixel image of things, such as a pumpkin. We apply RPILG in Science Birds. A facial expression tool is used to recognize smiles in the player. And in our design, the black bird, a kind of shooting object in the game having the power to explode blocks, is modified such that its explosion power can be enhanced according to the degree of smiling. The idea behind this game design is to encourage smiling. An experiment is conducted with fourteen participants where two modes of gameplay “smiling for enhancing the birds” and “baseline play” are compared. An online survey using Positive and Negative Affect Schedule is used to evaluate the players' emotion after they have experienced both modes. Our experimental results provide an evidence that the former mode leads to statistically significantly higher positive affect and lower negative affect.