Engagement in Computer and Video Games

This poster gives an introductory summery of one of the approaches in a multi-nodal framework. The approach presented here is the Study of physiological responses of in-game player experience for engagement. Other components of a multi-nodal approach that are not included in this poster are, literature studies, the study of player accounts of the play experience and the study of in-game metric data in computer and video games. The approach described here is the study of real-time data acquisition from physiological responses generated during play sessions. The data acquisition is generated through, Eye-tracking, using a Tobii X2-30 Eye-tracker, temperature and galvanism in fingers, EEG, with the Emotive EEG, Neuroheadset, EPOC Neuroheadset and 3D Brain Activity Map and by measuring heart rate variability. The real-time physiological data acquisition from the play session is conducted and displayed together with the game on a “4K," extreme high-resolution 3840 × 2160 pixel display system. This allows users to record the play-session and the acquisition data all on one display. This provides optimized access to synchronized data when recorded sessions are later under review for analysis. The display is 4 times larger than conventional HD displays and configuration by using a generic PC "Quad-CORE" equipped computer with an AMD "V7900" graphics card running on the Microsoft Windows 7 OS. The four Display-Port outputs from the card are converted to four DVIs, which are connected to the "DM-3410-A", 4K monitor manufactured by Astrodesign Inc. The physiological data acquisition is operated by the PC and displayed in the seven fields on the screen as shown in fig 1. This method of studying the physiological responses of in-game player experience provides a large spectrum of data. This data together with the other approaches in a multi-nodal framework can help researchers and designers in gaining further knowledge about correlations between player engagemen- and computer and video games.