An implementation of affective adaptation in survival horror games

In this research, we investigated two important aspects of affective gaming, which are the recognition of the player´s affective states and the adaptation of the game based on the player´s current affective state, by using survival horror games as an experimental environment. In the previous work, we analyzed the affective states of players collected through our own affect annotation tool during their gameplay and constructed affective-state prediction models that predicted their affective states from their brainwave and heart rate signals collected concurrently. In this work, we developed an affective survival horror game based on the previous findings and conducted another experiment to compare between affective and non-affective versions of the game. In the affective version, the timing of horror events were implicitly changed based on the player´s affective state. The result showed that the implicit change of timing made no significant difference in the evaluation of the players, but the game itself shows good potential for future research in the affective gaming field.