O' game, can you feel my frustration?: improving user's gaming experience via stresscam

TLDR: The results show that the automatic difficulty adjustable system successfully maintains game players' interests and substantially outperforms traditional fixed-difficulty mode games.

Abstract: One of the major challenges of video game design is to have appropriate difficulty levels for users in order to maximize the entertainment value of the game. Game players may lose interests if a game is either too easy or too difficult. This paper presents a novel methodology to improve user's experience in computer games by automatically adjusting the level of the game difficulty. The difficulty level is computed from measurements of the facial physiology of the players at a distance. The measurements are based on the assumption that the players' performance during the game-playing session alters blood flow in the supraorbital region, which is an indirect measurement of increased mental activities. This alters heat dissipation, which can be monitored in a contact-free manner through a thermal imaging-based stress monitoring and analysis system, known as StressCam. In this work, we investigated on two primary objectives: (1) the feasibility of utilizing the facial physiology in automatically adjusting the difficulty level of the game and (2) the capability of the automatic difficulty level adjustment in improving game players' experience. We employed and extended a XNA video game for this study, and performed an in-depth, comparative usability evaluation on it. Our results show that the automatic difficulty adjustable system successfully maintains game players' interests and substantially outperforms traditional fixed-difficulty mode games. Although a number of issues of this preliminary study remain to be investigated further, this research opens a new direction that utilizes non-contact stress measurements for monitoring and further enhancing a variety of user-centric, interactive entertainment activities.