Video games offer a unique opportunity for science due to their interactive nature. Players experience a broad variety of situations, provoking individual reactions and emotions — whether it’s excitement from a fantasy adventure or suspense from a horror game. But what if the game itself could adapt and change according to the player’s emotions? University of Malta’s (UM) Institute of Digital Games explores this possibility with the development of ‘affective computing’. Affective computing involves developing systems that can recognize, interpret, process, and predict human affect.
According to Dr Konstantinos Makantasis (key developer of TAMED and post-doctoral researcher with the Institute of Digital Games, UM), the vision is to “create methods for capturing and recognizing users' emotional states, which in turn can potentially be used by game designers to develop games that automatically adapt to users’ mood.” In addition to players' in-game behaviours, the project also uses data such as facial expressions and utterances that can be captured through a gaming device’s camera and microphones.
While this kind of technology could have a huge impact on the gaming industry, Makantasis explains that there are other applications for his research that reach way beyond gaming, such as mental health and marketing.
The full version of the article can be read in THINK Issue 38 or . This edition focuses on Emotional Well-Being.
Author - Jan-Marc Bleck
