A Design Exploration of Affective Gaming

Abstract: Physiological sensing has been a prominent fixture in games user research since the late 1990s, when researchers began to explore its potential to enhance and understand experience within digital game play. Since these early days, it has been widely argued that “affective gaming”, or gameplay that is influenced by a player’s emotional state, can enhance player experience by integrating physiological sensors into play. In this talk, I will discuss my thesis topic—in which I conduct a design exploration of the field of affective gaming by first, systematically exploring the field and creating a framework (the affective game loop) to classify existing literature; and second by presenting two design probes, to probe and explore the design space of affective games contextualized within the affective game loop: In the Same Boat and Commons Sense.

Biography: Raquel Robinson is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Dr. Regan Mandryk. She is broadly interested in using affective physiological communication to enhance game and live-streaming experiences.

She obtained her Master of Science degree in Computational Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2018. During her Master’s degree, she designed a tool called ‘All the Feels’—an overlay which adds game live streamers’ biometric data onto the stream in order to enhance the spectator experience.