Emotion Assessment From Physiological Signals for Adaptation of Game Difficulty

• Published in: IEEE transactions on systems, man and cybernetics. Part A, Systems and humans Vol. 41; no. 6; pp. 1052 - 1063
• Main Authors: Chanel, G., Rebetez, C., Bétrancourt, M., Pun, T.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-11-2011
• Subjects: Adaptation; Assessments; Categories; Cybernetics; Electroencephalography; emotion assessment; Emotion recognition; Emotions; Games; Human; Pattern classification; Physiology; signal analysis; Trains
• ISSN: 1083-4427; 1558-2426
• DOI: 10.1109/TSMCA.2011.2116000

This paper proposes to maintain player's engagement by adapting game difficulty according to player's emotions assessed from physiological signals. The validity of this approach was first tested by analyzing the questionnaire responses, electroencephalogram (EEG) signals, and peripheral signals of the players playing a Tetris game at three difficulty levels. This analysis confirms that the different difficulty levels correspond to distinguishable emotions, and that, playing several times at the same difficulty level gives rise to boredom. The next step was to train several classifiers to automatically detect the three emotional classes from EEG and peripheral signals in a player-independent framework. By using either type of signals, the emotional classes were successfully recovered, with EEG having a better accuracy than peripheral signals on short periods of time. After the fusion of the two signal categories, the accuracy raised up to 63%.