Affective gaming: beyond using sensors

Affective, 'emotional' as widely known, gaming, constitutes the new frontier for game design and development. The ultimate goal is being able to read the emotional state of a gamer and use it to change the game in such a way so as to provide to him/her a more immersive experience, a better gameplay. However, existing affective gaming approaches use specialized sensors in order to extract behavioral cues, introducing in that way a variety of challenges. The main issue to be resolved is that of affecting the player's immersion in the game scenario by having an impact on his/her behavior, in terms of the actions and emotions he/she displays. In this paper we survey existing approaches in the field of affective gaming, briefly describing the sensors used to extract behavioral cues (mainly physiological ones) and also presenting the commercial applications developed that employ those sensors. In addition, we propose two effective, low-cost and easy to implement affective game scenarios, in which the behavior of a social group playing with a games machine is studied. The proposed scenarios `use' Kinect to extract the behavioral cues under examination, that can be later used to evoke specific emotions to the players and alter the game's objective and plot, providing in that way a more realistic interaction between the player and the game.