Encourage Players to Smile While Playing Games Bring More Enjoyment

This paper presents a video game system with a smile interface designed to promote the player experience. We introduce a new mechanism to an existing endless runner game, "Runner." Such mechanism allows smiles to be taken as an input to the game system, for triggering boosting period. To detect smiles, a deep-learning facial recognition toolkit named Affdex, by Affectiva, is employed. Evaluation on player experience was done using a shorten version of Game User Experience Satisfaction Scale. Three different game modes are compared: Standard Mode (no smile and boosting), Smile Mode (with smile for boosting), and Auto Mode (auto boosting, without smile). Our results show that the presence of the smile mechanism leads to more enjoyable gameplay.