Emotionally Conscious Games Readings

I will hand copies of these out in class, but just for the record.

The Tao of Equus, Linda Kohanov: Predatory Logic pp. 92-97, Horse Training for Therapists pp. 223-241

Video Games, Fiction, and Emotion, Grant Tavinor

Neurofeedback in Psychological Practice, Frank Masterpasqua and Kathryn N Healey

Riding Between the Worlds, Linda Kohanov: Emotional Message Chart pp. 231-237

Although not directly related, some of you may be interested in looking at Epona Equestrian Services, which is Linda Kohanov's barn/business.

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.

For more complete details, download the .doc file.

Neural Headset

Not sure how many of you are familiar with these, but since they'll probably relate to my research and maybe some of yours I'm posting here.

Emotiv Systems is developing a neural headset for gamers, which will be available late this year (2008). The novelty of this device is not that it can read brainwaves, but that it reads brainwaves without having to stick things to the person's head. Add in a gyroscope, and some infrared for head tracking and you could end up with a really neat device.

Another neural headset from NeuroSky, the MindSet. This one seems to work somewhat differently than the Emotiv EPOC. Both headsets read brainwaves without silicon gel. However the Mindset doesn't read facial expressions; it seems more focused on attention and eye-tracking.