We warmly congratulate Julian Frommel about his successful disputation of a dissertation with the title PLAYER STATE ASSESSMENT: Enabling Unobtrusive Integration and Adaptive Games.
The corresponding talk in March was of the following content:
The design, development, and research of digital games relies on methods to evaluate how players experience play, e.g., which emotional states are evoked. Many methods evaluating human-computer interaction systems do not work well in a gaming context for various reasons: They focus on metrics such as task performance that are less relevant for play experiences, require additional, not ubiquitously available sensors, or impede natural game interaction due to obtrusiveness like interruptions of game play.
In my research, I discuss requirements for assessment methods and present studies demonstrating and validating objective and subjective methods that can be employed in a natural game setting. In particular, I present an unobtrusive emotion recognition approach using input parameters on a graphics tablet in combination with in-game performance in a serious gaming context. Further, I present two studies introducing methods for the unobtrusive integration of subjective assessment in games by mapping questionnaire elements to in-game elements and dialogues with non-player-characters. Finally, I show how to leverage unobtrusive assessment methods to improve player experience with a method that dynamically adapts game difficulty based on players' frustration and boredom.
The presented approaches allow the evaluation of player states enabling researchers to gather insights on player experience and helping developers and designers to improve their games. Further, the automatic adaptation of game features based on emotions can help address player states that should be avoided depending on the desired player experience.
We wish him all the best to his further carrier in research which he will persue in Canada!
