Blog #18: Biofeedback game design: using direct and indirect physiological control to enhance game interaction

Reference Information
Biofeedback game design: using direct and indirect physiological control to enhance game interaction. By Lennart Erik Nacke, Michael Kalyn, Calvin Lough, and Regan Lee Mandryk. Presented in the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems.

Author Bios
All the authors were from the University of Saskatchewan at the time the paper was written. Lennart Erik Nacke is now an assistant professor at UOIT. Michael Kalyn was an undergraduate student, and Regan Lee Mandryk was an assistant professor.

Summary
Hypothesis
They had three primary questions that they wanted to answer. These included how users responded to games augmented with psychological sensors, which types of psychological sensors work best for which game, and how to integrate gaze location effectively.

Methods
They created a game, that was a side-scrolling platform shooter game, which used a normal controller with some additional psychological input methods. Then they created a study, where they had users play the game and then give feedback on some game specific questions and the overall game play experience. They used three conditions, changing between two psychological control methods, and a normal controller only. Each participant played the game from 10-35 minutes, their were 10 participants, 7 male, and some played games regularly and others did not.

Results
They found that players found the psychological controls to be more fun than the test with no psychological controls, with no difference between the two conditions.They also found that participants felt that the psychological controls were novel. They also included a number of opinions from the participants.

Contents
They started the paper by introducing the concept of psychological feedback, and the game that they made based on it. They then talked about some related work. They also talked about the specific feedback mechanisms, including: gaze interaction, electromyography, electrodermal activity, electrocardiography, a respiration sensor, and a temperature sensor. They then went onto the study and a discussion of the study.

Biofeedback game design: using direct and indirect physiological control to enhance game interaction. By Lennart Erik Nacke, Michael Kalyn, Calvin Lough, and Regan Lee Mandryk.

Discussion
The paper is interesting because it gives some additional information onto how biofeedback can work in games. Their are some issues in the work. First of all, the statistical tests used are not really valid when used on just 10 samples. Also, the novelty of the biofeedback may explain why people liked it, and if it were used more it may not be liked very much if it was used a lot in games. This paper can make me think of entire games though built on a lot of the features discussed.