Know Your Game, From in-Real Life Experts to Video Game Experts: Discriminating in-Real Life Experts From Non Experts Using Blinks and EAR-Derived Features

Serious games are an effective method of reproducing aspects of the complex interplay between environments and stakeholders in business situations. In the game, we describe here, The Sustainable Port, players experience what it is like to make decisions in such a complex environment. Their aim in the game is to grow the Port of Rotterdam while keeping economic growth in balance with sustainability goals. In this study, we assessed whether experienced Port of Rotterdam employees (PoR employees) show different psychophysiological patterns, and more specifically eye aspect ratio (EAR)-derived features, compared to students. We did this on the assumption that physiological patterns will tell us something about how people who are familiar with the environment of the Port of Rotterdam, more specifically PoR employees, make decisions compared to those lacking such familiarity. Our sample consisted of 28 PoR employees and 65 students, all of whom played The Sustainable Port game and had their faces recorded with a camera. The EAR was extracted from these recordings, and then from those, we extracted EAR-derived features. Our results show that PoR employees perform better than students and that the two groups are characterized by different physiological variations in their EAR-derived features. A logistic regression model used to identify PoR employees and students obtained an F1 score of 0.62, an area under the precision–recall curve score of 0.64, and an ROC AUC score of 0.70. Such a performance significantly above baseline suggests the effectiveness of using EAR-derived features for this task. Our interpretation was further confirmed by a pseudo-R2 score used to evaluate the goodness of fit of a logistic regression model on the entire dataset. We found that PoR employees had a lower variation in blink rate per minute and higher variation in the root mean square of the successive differences in blinks (RMSSD), the consecutive difference between two continuous blinks. Moreover, this study shows that our methods were robust enough to negate the effects of confounders, such as biological sex and age, that affect some other studies that analyze blinks.