Abstract
Immersive experiences are typically considered an indicator of successful game design. The ability to maintain the player’s focus and enjoyment in the game lies at the core of game mechanics. In this work, we used a custom virtual reality game aiming to induce flow, boredom and anxiety throughout specific instances in the game. We used self-reports of personality and flow in addition to physiological measures (heart rate variability) as a means of evaluating the game design. Results yielded a consistently high accuracy in the classification of low flow versus high flow conditions across multiple classifiers. Moreover, they suggested that the anticipated model-by-design was not necessarily consistent with the player’s subjective and objective data. Our approach lays promising groundwork for the automatic assessment of game design strategies and may help explain experiential variability across video game players.
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Notes
- 1.
Disclaimer: The game used in this study was developed for the purpose of the study alone and is not intended for commercial release.
- 2.
SDNN: Standard deviation of NN. HR: Heart Rate. pNN50: The percentage of adjacent NNs that have a distance of more than 50Â ms. RMSSD: The root mean square of successive NNs. For a review, see [14].
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Jeremy Hogan (Worldwide Studios, London), Fabio Capello (Sony Interactive Entertainment, London) and Charlie Hargood (Bournemouth University) for their guidance, and Bournemouth University, EPSRC, Centre for Digital Entertainment and Sony Interactive Entertainment for funding Mr. Michailidis’s studentship.
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Michailidis, L., Lucas Barcias, J., Charles, F., He, X., Balaguer-Ballester, E. (2019). Combining Personality and Physiology to Investigate the Flow Experience in Virtual Reality Games. In: Stephanidis, C. (eds) HCI International 2019 - Posters. HCII 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1033. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23528-4_7
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