Real-time analysis of skin conductance for affective dynamic difficulty adjustment in video games

Audience: Undergraduate. -- Dissertation: Thesis (B. A.). -- Algoma University, 2016. -- Submitted in partial fulfillment of course requirements for COSC 4235. -- Includes figures. -- Contents: Thesis.

ABSTRACT -- As video games continue to penetrate the mainstream, their target audiences expand and diversify. For this reason, it is unreasonable to expect a video game with static difficulty levels to cater to an audience with a variety of skills and emotional traits. Affective dynamic difficulty adjustment, one of the many areas of exploration within the nascent field of affective gaming, is a high-level design concept that is intended to leverage the player’s indicators of emotion (often physiological) to manipulate the difficulty of a video game in real-time. A review of two dozen studies reveals that skin conductance – the most widely used physiological response system in the history of psychophysiology – can be used to modify the difficulty of a video game, but it is most effective when paired with other psychological indicators of emotion, such as heart rate. Overall, a cross-disciplinary review of over 90 publications provides readers with a comprehensive view of the history, current works, future challenges, and design issues pertaining to psychophysiology, affective gaming, and other related fields. To illustrate one way in which skin conductance can be used to inform an affective dynamic difficulty adjustment algorithm, a top-down shooter titled Electroderma is created. A performant emotion-sensing algorithm, titled data subset analysis, is developed by the author as part of the game. Initial results for both the game and algorithm are promising, but usability testing must be conducted to formally validate the author’s work.