Well it’s nearing the end of phase 2, but I thought I could add in one more research area. So picking another card this time I got technology, which I thought was ironic as it took me back to how I had started the project by looking into the MyndPlay technology.
I researched initially into technology that revolved around colour with this being the most significant theme in my research currently. Mainly I was trying to find technology that could inspire a narrative or mechanic which could form the basis of a game. All helping to expand out how I look at the topic of colour and enrich the inspiration for my game ideas later on.
Colour Altering Dress
Dress that changes colour depending what is selected on the device.
Showpo Productions
Thoughts
- Must be fake surely – I felt like this would have been all over the news if it was real
- However its a interesting concept of changing how you dress
- What if characters clothes changed depending on their mood
- Or if the colours changed to give the character a new ability of identify
- Interesting mechanics
Scribble Pen
Thoughts
- Brings up ideas of players able to collect colours and draw with them in game – similar fashion to scribblenauts
- Players trying to steal all the colours from the world through this device
- Collect different colours to change abilities or appearance of a character in game?
Brain Devices
Well I couldn’t go too long looking into technology without going back into brain devices and researching more about how they work and the variety of equipment out there.
Relaxation and concentration with brain waves
- Use of blinking as a mechanic and concentration as a mechanic
- Not always very accurate
- Very basic games
- Amazing – Like Mind control powers and I want them!
Beginning too feel its far too technical for this too be done at this stage – My ideas are too far in the future?
Are there other devices that can be used to control games?
- Heart rate
- Sight? – Blinking or direction – Eye scanning
The race to control video games using your mind
NeuroGaming Expo
Human body as a controller
Heart Beat to control games
- If the mind is too tricky what are other ways that I could use the body as a controller?
Heart beat relates to emotions as your heart beat changes when your emotions change and so I thought I’d look at this as a possible alternative to measuring brain waves
Skip a Beat
- Speed of the character changes depending on your heart rate
- Higher heart rate = faster the character
- Play as a frog and must collect the dragonflies and avoid all other creatures
- 2D game – Continuous runner – Must hold the screen to make the frog move upwards and release the hold to make it fall – Catch the bugs
How it works?
- Turn camera flash on and place your finger over the light and the camera and it will record your heart rate.
Personal Playthrough
- Gimmicky – I’m not sure it really works – Maybe too an extent but it didnt feel that accurate to me and my heart rate would lower went I walked around and get higher when I sat down when surely it would be the other way round
- Also we have to raise our own heart beat which is hard when playing a game – Maybe should have designed a game that raises your own heart beat then uses that as a mechanic.
Its clear to me that though the mechanic of measuring heart beats through a phone light is innovative, the technology is still too young in its infancy to work very accurately at all. Therefore I don’t feel it would be advisable for me to try to copy this mechanic within my own work, as I know unreliable beat results would be gained creating a weak and frustrating game-play experience.
Nevermind
- Nevermind is a horror game that uses your heart beat against you.
- The game uses a heart rate monitor which is attached to the player. The game records the heart rate of users, the speed of the heart determines how scary the game is, with a higher rate causing the game to be more terrifying. So the aim of the game is to try to control your heart rate in order to make the game easier to play.
- Heart rate controls the games difficulty.
Biofeedback Technology
- Records heart rate and uses it as a mechanic
- More scared – Increase Heart rate – Harder the game
Thoughts
- Highly technical – In production for years – Could I really do this?
- Heart beat controls a variable – Only controls an aspect of the game eg the difficulty, rather than the movement and actions of a character which I had been looking into for other games – Different way of incorporating the recordings of the body within a game
Controlling games with Emotions
Research on how games can be used to control emotions, as well as how emotions can be recorded and how these results could be used in a game context.
Refer to Research Folder
HAVARD MAGAZINE
THE GUARDIAN – EMOTIONS OF AI
RAGE CONTROL PROTOTYPES
Champions of Shengha
Measuring emotions
Measuring Emotional Responses in Game
SYNC GAME
- Sync is a game where the player’s facial expressions are detected and used to alter the narrative in the game.
- Sync uses the player’s webcam to record the expressions, asking users to align their face at the beginning of the game.
- Using the Unity plugin Affectiva’s Affdex the developers have managed to get the program to distinguish different facial expressions in the players, to identify how they are reacting to the character and to develop the story based on the player’s emotions
- Sync isn’t so much a game as an interactive narrative, taking the users through the grieving pain of husband who has lost his wife in a car accident. How the responds emotionally to the story determines whether husband gets over the loss or not.
DOWNLOAD
Play-through
- I suppose I had expected the game to recognise all emotions, but that was naive of me, as it was only actually able to recognise 3, happy, sad, shocked. Which I felt limited how I could react to the story-line as I couldn’t emotionally response how I wanted to, I had to respond within the parameters of the game, making my reactions feel very forced, which ruined any sort of emotional attachment I had to the character. Also the expressions had to be over the top for the game to capture what you were doing, again leading to the feeling of forcing emotions, as they weren’t natural
- From playing through the game I feel I have realised that this technology definitely isn’t suitable to base my project around, as it just isn’t developed or refinement enough to be able to record genuine emotions like I want. Therefore I believe my game would become gimmicky if I tried to use this, due to the limitations of it, which ultimately would end up with me producing a poor product.
Reflection
I don’t feel I should have done this research as it’s just brought back all the excitement and motivation to want to create a game based off of the recording input from the body and using that to influence the game. Which is something I had moved away from and accepted that it would be challenging to do effectively and so it would be better to place my efforts into an area where the technology was more developed and well known, so i won’t struggle with the designing and programming sides of the project. However this research has just fuelled my interest in it again and now I can’t seem to let it go, which is problematic to say the least. As now I have a lot of areas I have researched into that are of interest to me and I don’t know which to choose. So I will plan to take a break, get some rest and then sit down and look through my project highlighting areas that are of key interest to me to focus on within the next phase.
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