Gamers are always demanding new experiences. Fortunately then, game developers and platform holders have continually been dreaming up new ways in which to entertain us. Over the last ten years we’ve seen games focus on technology: increasing graphical fidelity, delivering more natural animation and improving AI and physics. More recently, new game experiences have been delivered by gestural interaction controllers such the Wii, Move and Kinect, also bringing with them a new audience.
The latest craze that promised to deliver new levels of game immersion was Nintendo’s 3DS. So far, its take on stereoscopic 3D hasn't. However, what has been successful is social gaming, which has enjoyed a meteoric rise in popularity in just the last four years. It seems that what was missing from new game experiences was not technical innovation, but rather connecting with other people.
So what if we could use the latest technological advances to better understand people to deliver new gaming experiences? One technology that aims to do just this is biometrics, essentially capturing data from the player’s body such as heart rate, skin temperature and response, brain waves or eye tracking. When combined with cameras observing the players’ facial expressions and body movements, new levels of player understanding are possible.
At Gamescom last week, Shuhei Yoshida of Sony Worldwide Studios said that the use of biometrics will not only be able to detect players’ emotions, but also that within 10 years, games will be able to offer unprecedented levels of interactivity. The key to this is building up an understanding of the player, a biometric profile, which may not only know what you enjoy, but possibly also how you might behave in a given situation.
This quest for biometric identity is along similar lines to what Jesse Schell refers to as psychographics in his book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, our internal motivations for play. Whereas demographics identify external factors such as age, gender, where we live and so on, our psychographics are about our motivations and what makes us unique. If we can identify these factors, then we can come much closer to delivering better game experiences. During playtests we often see players who have the same demographics but they all react differently to the game because their psychographics are individual.
We use biometrics in nearly all of our playtests, not only to identify where the player is excited or frustrated, but also to better understand their likes and dislikes and construct their biometric profiles. After all, we’re not just interested in figuring out if they are enjoying our clients’ game, we want to know what sort of gamer they are.
The bother with biometrics
However, biometrics are not perfect, and each approach has its own problems. For example, eye tracking will show where the player is looking, but not if they’re using their peripheral vision to identify a UI element. For those sensors which attach to the body, we’ve seen a few people with a very low biometric response. Players’ bodies are all different, and unpredictable.
And how could we calibrate for each person? What if they’ve just been engaged in physical activity? Should we ask them to wait a while before playing? Players don’t even wait to read important game instructions, so asking them to wait before play is perhaps expecting too much.
Even relatively simple biometrics such as pulse rate is not guaranteed to work with all gamers. Nintendo has stated that it did not bring the Vitality Sensor to market as they could only get it to work with 80 per cent of players. When we use GSR (galvanic skin response) during playtests we see a successful reaction around 90 per cent of the time, so it’s not guaranteed for everyone.
But we still use biometrics to help us evaluate the player experience in almost all of our playtests. Why? Well, they can identify precise moments during play when players are reacting to a game element. We wouldn’t have picked this up from watching their facial expressions, or from what they said, or even what they did. However, what we can’t tell is why the player reacted, so we still have to ask in post-interviews by replaying those key sections of video. Essentially, it helps us tell more about a player’s internal motivations, and when combined with data from observations and interviews, we get a more complete picture of the how they’re experiencing the game.
Emotion engines
Despite the issues with biometrics today, let’s assume the technology works perfectly for everyone in ten years time. Could it offer new game experiences? Definitely. You could be matched with online players who have similar biometric profiles to your own - after all, wouldn’t it be useful to play with those who are motivated by similar gameplay elements as ourselves? “Ohh, you like brushing the hair on your magic goat too, I thought I was the only one”. The possibilities are endless.
Of course some games rely on the fact that you don’t want other people to know how you feel. Online gambling games for example might be somewhat less engaging if you could tell the emotional state of the other players. Or even if the other players couldn’t see your biometrics, how would you feel if the game could?
Today, most of us are happy to make the trade with Google; personal information for quality results, but would we do the same with Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo? The difference is, of course, that with Google you type information into the search bar consciously. But with biometrics, information about you can be sent continuously to outside parties without you having any idea of what it's saying.
But what if you could see the data that was being captured? Perhaps what you thought excited you about a game wasn’t actually true after all? Perhaps the game held your attention in more places than you realised? Would this affect what you tell friends about that the game? Might it change the word of mouth effect to game sales? What if you can earn and compare achievements from your bio-performance? Are you the master of bodily control or has a friend kept a lower heart rate during an intense battle?
There is so much potential to biometrics - telling us more about other players is one thing, but they can also tell us a lot about our own relationships with videogames.
Graham McAllister is director of game usability lab Vertical Slice. Read and follow Graham's other columns on his topic page.