What Can Body Movement Tell Us About Players' Engagement?
Nadia Bianchi‐Berthouze · 2012
During the exploration phase, the player is engaged in understanding what the control movements are and how their body can accomplish them. A body-pattern-entropy measure could be used to detect these explorative phases. This measure could be computed for different body parts or groups of body parts. Investigating the profile of these measures over time could provide insights into the effort and progress of the players. It could be expected that, rather than decreasing over time, their profile may be characterized by multiple local minima (each corresponding to the learning of a particular body movement pattern), until certain body patterns are acquired. If a player remains in a local minimum for too long and his/her task-control movements are still far from optimal, boredom or frustration may appear and the player may disengage. When a set of coordinated taskcontrol movements has been learnt, i.e. their distance from their optimal execution is below a certain threshold, their consolidation phase may start. In this phase, we may expect that the measure of body pattern entropy may increase only on the body parts involved in the type of patterns to consolidate. A measure of distance between