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User Experience Research & Design in Games

You are here: Home / Publications / Fuzzy Affective Player Models: A Physiology-Based Hierarchical Clustering Method

Fuzzy Affective Player Models: A Physiology-Based Hierarchical Clustering Method

April 19, 2021 by

by Pedro A Nogueira, Rúben Aguiar, Rui A Rodrigues, Eugénio C Oliveira, Lennart E Nacke
Abstract:
Current approaches to game design improvements rely on time-consuming gameplay testing processes, which rely on highly subjective feedback from a target audience. In this paper, we propose a generalizable approach for building predictive models of players’ emotional reactions across different games and game genres, as well as other forms of digital stimuli. Our input agnostic approach relies on the following steps: (a) collecting players’ physiologically-inferred emotional states during actual gameplay sessions, (b) extrapolating the causal relations between changes in players’ emotional states and recorded game events, and (c) building hierarchical cluster models of players’ emotional reactions that can later be used to infer individual player models via fuzzy cluster membership vectors. We expect this work to benefit game designers by accelerating the affective play-testing process through the offline simulation of players’ reactions to game design adaptations, as well as to contribute towards individually-tailored affective gaming.
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Reference:
Fuzzy Affective Player Models: A Physiology-Based Hierarchical Clustering Method (Pedro A Nogueira, Rúben Aguiar, Rui A Rodrigues, Eugénio C Oliveira, Lennart E Nacke), In Proceedings of AIIDE 2014, AAAI, 2014.
Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{nogueira2014fuzzy,
abstract = {Current approaches to game design improvements rely on time-consuming gameplay testing processes, which rely on highly subjective feedback from a target audience. In this paper, we propose a generalizable approach for building predictive models of players’ emotional reactions across different games and game genres, as well as other forms of digital stimuli. Our input agnostic approach relies on the following steps: (a) collecting players' physiologically-inferred emotional states during actual gameplay sessions, (b) extrapolating the causal relations between changes in players' emotional states and recorded game events, and (c) building hierarchical cluster models of players' emotional reactions that can later be used to infer individual player models via fuzzy cluster membership vectors. We expect this work to benefit game designers by accelerating the affective play-testing process through the offline simulation of players' reactions to game design adaptations, as well as to contribute towards individually-tailored affective gaming.},
address = {Raleigh, NC, United States},
author = {Nogueira, Pedro A and Aguiar, R'{u}ben and Rodrigues, Rui A and Oliveira, Eug'{e}nio C and Nacke, Lennart E},
booktitle = {Proceedings of AIIDE 2014},
pages = {132--138},
publisher = {AAAI},
title = {{Fuzzy Affective Player Models: A Physiology-Based Hierarchical Clustering Method}},
url = {http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AIIDE/AIIDE14/paper/view/8947/8939},
year = {2014}
}

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