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Inferring Player Experiences Using Facial Expressions Analysis

Published: 02 December 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding player experiences is central to game design. Video captures of players is a common practice for obtaining rich reviewable data for analysing these experiences. However, not enough has been done in investigating ways of preprocessing the video for a more efficient analysis process. This paper consolidates and extends prior work on validating the feasibility of using automated facial expressions analysis as a natural quantitative method for evaluating player experiences. A study was performed on participants playing a first-person puzzle shooter game (Portal 2) and a social drawing trivia game (Draw My Thing), and results were shown to exhibit rich details for inferring player experiences from facial expressions. Significant correlations were also observed between facial expression intensities and self reports from the Game Experience Questionnaire. In particular, the challenge dimension consistently showed positive correlations with anger and joy. This paper eventually presents a case for increasing the application of computer vision in video analyses of gameplay.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
IE2014: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Interactive Entertainment
December 2014
259 pages
ISBN:9781450327909
DOI:10.1145/2677758
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • The University of Newcastle, Australia

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 02 December 2014

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Author Tags

  1. GEQ
  2. facial expressions analysis
  3. game design
  4. game user research
  5. player experience
  6. video games

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IE2014
IE2014: Interactive Entertainment 2014
December 2 - 3, 2014
NSW, Newcastle, Australia

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IE2014 Paper Acceptance Rate 27 of 42 submissions, 64%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 64 of 148 submissions, 43%

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