Emotionally Conscious Games

Video games have previously been used for recreation, but are becoming popular as a device for learning, health and other “useful” activities. This paper proposes the idea of using video games to help a person recognize and handle emotions. The term created for these emotion awareness games is “emotionally conscious games”, which descends from “socially conscious games”. Emotional well-being is often derided in today’s fast-paced, business oriented society, but emotional awareness can actually help a person make better decisions. Specific hardware devices, such as an EEG or the Emotiv EPOC headset will be needed to read brainwaves and/or emotions from the player. This data can than be processed in some meaningful way, providing some kind of useful in-game feedback. Since the “big picture” of emotionally conscious games may be too extensive for a master’s thesis, some smaller milestones are presented as more appropriate goals. Emotionally conscious games will draw from many areas, including psychology, signal processing, and game development.

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