Emotion in Games by Kostas Karpouzis & Georgios N. Yannakakis

Author:Kostas Karpouzis & Georgios N. Yannakakis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

First-Order vs. Second-Order Level Generators

Arguably the level design process as a whole is, by nature, built and driven by emotion. On the one hand there is a player that experiences a particular game level. That interaction with the game level elicits affective responses, enables particular cognitive processes and, as a result, yields to a particular playing behavior. Such player emotional responses may, in turn, reflect on the player’s bodily reactions (facial expression, posture) or affect changes in the player’s physiology. Those affect manifestations caused (in part) by the design of the level can be captured via e.g. physiological sensors or web cameras (see other chapters of this book) and can be used as input to a model that predicts player emotion. Such a model can, in turn be used for personalized level design. In this chapter, we refer to this player-centric approach to emotion-driven level generation first-order. On the other hand there is a level designer that has particular goals, intentions, preferences, styles and expectations from her design [8]. Most importantly, the level designer incrementally internalizes and builds a high level (or even rather detailed) model of expected player experience during the design process that is used as a design guide. That internal model is tested through piloting, and thorough play-testing. If via testing a mismatch is found between the model of the expected player experience and the actual player experience then two design options are applicable and can even concur: either the level is adjusted accordingly or the designer’s expectations and goals about the player experience are altered to match the actual experience. The game emotive goals of the designer and aspects of that internal player experience model can be captured in a similar fashion as with the player. The designer manifests bodily, cognitive and behavioral responses to the design during the design process. Such responses can provide the input to computational representations of the designer’s affective, cognitive or behavioral aspects (i.e. designer models [8]). We name that designer-centric approach to player experience design as second-order since it is based on an indirect modeling of player experience.

In summary first-order experience-driven level generators build on a model of player experience, whereas second-order generators build on a model of designer experience which may include intents, goals, styles, preferences and expectations (see Fig. 9.1).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.