Blow Up Depression with In-Game TNTs

This paper proposes a TNT-generation system in Science Birds, an Angry Birds clone, which is aimed to help spectators maintain healthy emotion. Interestingness-rating data on TNT explosions are collected from a number of participants. A regressor is then built from the collected data whose input consists of a set of features representing effects due to an explosion and output indicates the average interestingness. A user study is then conducted where participants are asked to answer a questionnaire measuring their positive and negative affect after watching each of the three gameplay videos - the explosions with the highest average interestingness, the explosions with the lowest average interestingness, the explosions with the highest interestingness predicted by the regressor - in counterbalanced order. Our results show that the first gameplay video statistically significantly increases the positive affect of the participants and that both first and third videos statistically significantly decrease the negative affect.