An analysis of affective state transitions in survival horror game with the aid of player self-reports and physiological signals
Vanus Vachiratamporn, Paul Salvador Inventado, Roberto Legaspi, Koichi Moriyama, Masayuki Numao · 人工知能学会全国大会論文集 · 2013
The current trend of indie survival horror games reveals some level of success in using randomly generated events or the randomness of AI behavior as main scaring technique and to extend game replayability. With more insight on how player’s affective states transitioned while playing survival horror games, the effectiveness of scary events could be increased. This paper analyzes the impact of different player affective states prior to (Neutral, Anxiety, Suspense) and after (Low-, Medium-, High-Fear) a scary event. Affect annotation tool was used to collect player’s pre and post scary event affect while playing a survival horror game. The player’s brainwave signals, heart rate and in-game actions were also collected for testing the potential of automatic measurement of horror game-related affect. Initial results indicated that players are more likely to get more fearful of a scary event when they are in suspense state, and the heart rate showed a good potential on differentiating players’ neutral, anxiety and suspense states. Game designers could utilize player’s affective state for maximizing player’s fear level by slowly building tension until the player got into the target pre-scary event emotion, and then play the scary event. The term “survival horror” was first introduced by Resident Evil (Capcom, 1996) and the survival horror genre had become a famous game genre as many game developers tried to follow the successful direction of the game. However, the nature of survival horror is the limited way of fighting hostiles and the slow speed tension building, eventually, more and more players turned their interest towards exciting action games instead. The golden age of survival horror ended with the release of Resident Evil 4 (Capcom, 2005) that turned away from the genre it had established by adding many action elements to the game which consequently reduced horror aspect of the game. While the popularity of survival horror began to fade away from the game market, an indie game called Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Frictional Games, 2010) had successfully brought the genre back to life and was praised by many critics for its decent atmosphere and horror elements. The game had showed that they are still many players out there who still hunger for more survival horror games. There are two interesting free downloadable indie-developed survival horror games that were released recently, Slender: The Eight Pages (Parsec Productions, 2012) and SCP: Containment Breach (Regalis, 2012). The first game was praised for its simplicity using very few horror approaches, some critic even went as far as calling this game a “pure horror”. Player has an objective of finding eight pages of paper scattered around the forest while being pursuit by Slender Man who randomly teleported around the map to find and create random surprise encounter and pressure player to be aware of Slender Man all the time. SCP: Containment Breach, on the other hand, has more complex environment and different variety of enemy. The key element of the game is the randomly generated map, making it possible to play the game multiple times and still has different experience. These two games have showed that, by including some randomness into the main horror approach of the games, it can extend the replayability of the game and can create an endless amount of memorable horror scene to any players. From our knowledge, there is not any work that tries to find the way to improve this kind of horror approach by investigating into players affect while they are playing survival horror games. In this work, we captured players’ affective states during the play experience by letting players label their emotions continuously while watching their gameplay video along with their facial expressions. Brainwaves, heart rate and keyboardmouse activity were collected during the course of the game for further analyzing their potentials in automatically detecting player emotions. Next section, we start by reviewing works that related to horror media emotions, horror games and utilization of physiological measure. We then briefly introduce tools and experiment procedures that we used for collecting physiological signals and players affect. Finally, we discuss our results and conclusion.