Proponents of “games as [insert serious thing here]” have long cited the medium’s ability to convey resonating emotional content as proof that games are worth taking seriously. Recent rumblings in game design and hardware research show the industry headed for a future in which emotional communication becomes a two-way street.
Mr. Spock has played this game before. He was not amused.
Mick Hocking, a senior director at Sony Worldwide Studios, stated at this year’s Gamescom that the games of tomorrow will “involve the player as an actor, as a participant.” Hocking imagines “having a camera being able to study a player’s biometrics and movements,” he said, “so perhaps you can play a detective game that decides whether you’re lying due to what it reads from your face.”
If you’re thinking about a sequel to LA Noire where you can play on either side of the interrogation table, you’re not the only one.
“Over a period of time, you can form a map of the player and their emotional state,” Hocking elaborated. “The more accurate that map can become, the more we can tailor it to the experience.”
While he was dodgy about whether this technology is currently under development at Sony, a patent application that came to the attention of Siliconera shows the PS3 reading a subject’s emotions (while they watch a man kick himself in his own ass, no less).
Sony is not alone in the quest to teach games to pick up on emotional cues. Valve has been conducting extensive research into biometric sensors and control mechanisms in an attempt to discover more immersive gameplay applications.
Notes from a GDC presentation this past April by Mike Ambinder detail the many areas of scientific testing going on in Valve’s labs (which I like to pretend are situated in a giant salt mine underneath Michigan, and involve a lot of interactions with super-colliding super-buttons). By measuring heart rate, skin conductance level, brainwave activity, eye movements, and facial expressions, and then feeding that data into game engines like Left 4 Dead 2‘s AI Director, designers have found ways to react to changes in players’ feelings as the game progresses.
With all of this research into detecting and reacting to a player’s emotions, we may finally see more fluidly engaging games where interactions are not limited to “press X to be evil, Press A to be good.” Personally, I am ready to pre-order my copy of A Young Girl’s Illustrated Primer
*Read more from our “Future of Gaming” series
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