Measuring Affective, Physiological and Behavioural Differences in Solo, Competitive and Collaborative Games

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to measure affect and behaviour indicators of players to understand how they feel in different play modes and how games could be improved to enhance user experience, immersion and engagement. We analyse the affective states in sets of two users playing AQ1 a Wii video game in three play modes: solo, competitive and collaborative. We measured their physiological signals and observed the nonverbal behaviours to infer their affective states. Although other studies have looked at these signals in gaming, this work focuses on the differences between the three play modes aforementioned. Our results show that: (1) Players experience similar levels of arousal during both solo and collaborative play modes; (2) players' heart rates are significantly correlated during the competitive mode but not during the collaborative one; and (3) heart rate variability is a good indicator of engagement when playing video games.

Objectivity and Subjectivity in Games: Understanding Engagement and Addiction Mechanism

“…Meanwhile, potential energy (E p ) in game is determined by adopting the analogy of gravitational potential formula in physic as defined by U = mgh in which g = a and h = y = 1 2 at 2 . Hence, E p = U can be defined as (3). Also, force (F ) is determined by assuming a constant value of a = 0.005 according to previous studies [35][88], given by (4).…”

“…However, some personality traits could lead to problematic gaming (i.e., form of coping [53] or stress response [77]) and other adverse effects when being highly engaged (i.e., due to difficult to form offline relationships) that could pathologically be headed towards addiction. Arellano et al [3] showed that engagement was prominent when there are more significant social interactions, conversations, and mutual glances that warrant efforts (or arousal) when playing competitively and collaboratively. Moreover, autonomy had a significant influence on engagement due to the ability to control difficulty levels and increases intrinsic motivation for learning that likely to change over time [50].…”

“…Motivation in game-playing is an essential affective component to retain player's engagement. If the play experience is dull, difficulty should be adjusted, which should be easier if it causes stress or frustration [3]. Understanding the gameplaying motivation is a useful starting point that assisted in formulating tolerance and mitigate persistence of gaming disorder or harmful reward-seeking behaviors [44].…”

“…Lottery composed of three main types: unique number lotteries, selected number lotteries, and scratch cards. The lottery tickets typically sold at 100 to 500 yen and available at takarakuji booth, stores, popular outlets, where it were held throughout the country on a regular basis for the top cash prizes that are usually 100 million yen or as law permits, up to 400 million yen 3 .…”

A Universal Framework For Systemizing the Evaluation of Immersive And Collaborative Performance

“…We have identified new available empirical studies published in 2017 and 2018 that were included as an update. Overall, we have analyzed 45 international scientific papers [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][46][47][48][49][50][51][52], one thesis written in French [45], and one specialized press article 2000 [17] published since (see Table 1).…”