Are you having fun yet?



Are you having fun yet?

(Image: 20th Century Fox/Everett/RexFeatures)



YOU’RE cornered and wounded. Cowering
behind
a crate, all you can do is hide and wait for the
acid-spraying alien to move on. You
desperately
look for a pattern in its movements, hoping
for a
chance to sneak past to safety.
So far, so scripted. But the chance still
doesn’t come.
 As you’re stuck in your corner, heart rate rising and
 a sheen of perspiration forming on your face, a
camera by the TV feeds data to the game. The
system is constantly judging. How much longer can
you take the tension? Is this still fun?
The latest game spawned from the Alien film franchise is being made by Creative Assembly,
a game studio
 in Horsham, UK. It is likely to be one of the first games to explore the potential of Microsoft’s
 next-
generation Kinect sensors for the Xbox One games console. Announced at the same time as the
 unveiling
of the Xbox One last week, the new Kinect is a huge improvement on its predecessor..

It will have HD colour and infrared cameras that can see if your eyes are open or closed in the
dark. It will
 be able to detect your pulse from fluctuations in skin tone and, by measuring how
light reflects
off your
face, it will know when you start to sweat.
This will allow the new Kinect to bring emotional gaming to your living room. Games can
use the
biological data to orchestrate your experience by adjusting the difficulty or intensity in
real time,
depending on how excited the system thinks you currently are.
“The key is understanding what makes games fundamentally satisfying,” says Scott Rigby,
 co-founder of
 Immersyve, a gaming consultancy in Celebration, Florida, that advises on ways to engage
players by
 gathering this biometric data. “I love the promise of it.”
But Rigby warns that detecting signs of high emotion in a player does not automatically
mean they are
 having a good time. “If I poke you with a stick, there is a spike in arousal,” he says.
“But that doesn’t
mean you like it and want me to do it again.”
“If I poke you with a stick, there is a spike in arousal. But that doesn’t mean you want me to do it again”
Biometric data from Kinect will still need to be combined with assumptions about what kind
 of emotional
 response a section of game is aiming for, says Rigby. For example, in a battle against a big
boss, players
 will typically tolerate dying about four times before getting frustrated, he says. After that, a
 game might
 be programmed to lower the level of difficulty. Feedback could be used to tailor this to an
individual’s
 preference.
Our bodies give away other clues too. “Kinect could measure how much mental effort
 you’re putting into
 a game or a specific task within a game,” says games psychologist and writer
 Jamie Madigan. “And it can
 tell when you’ve given up.”
For example, your pupils dilate when you are engaged in a cognitive challenge, and
return to normal when
 you have given up because something is too hard. “If the Kinect could reliably detect
pupil sizes, it would
 open up a whole new level of scaling game difficulty,” says Madigan. For example, a puzzle
 game could
 get harder until the player enters the “zone” of peak performance – when gaming is at its
most satisfying.
 It could also offer a hint when it detects you have given up.
Systems that could detect when you are mentally taxed could also take advantage – pushing
 in-game
 transactions such as buying an extra life or better weapons, for example. “Willpower is like
 a muscle that
 can be exhausted by any mental activity,” says Madigan. “When it’s depleted we’re more
likely to do
 dumb stuff like make impulse purchases.”