Videogame design as a elicit tool for emotion recognition experiments

Videogames are powerful tools to elicit emotions in players because they use different resources (visual, audio, game mechanics, story-telling, etc.) to engage the players' attention and enhance emotional experiences according to each videogame gender. Some videogames have been used as tools to elicit emotional responses from players in emotion recognition experiments, mostly related to game development scenarios. However, so far those videogames focus on elicit a particular set of emotions related to boredom, stress, fear or engagement, limiting the possibilities on using videogames to study emotion recognition, using a wider emotional spectrum. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a videogame as a tool to elicit different arousal - valence levels, and discrete emotions, for emotion recognition experiments under human-computer interaction scenarios. We performed a statistical analysis through self-assessed emotional responses from a group of 21 participants, using emotional scales and discrete emotions selection to identify the player experience in a 2D platform game. We found that with the structure proposed it is possible to elicit different emotions with the same tool, however, when we evaluated the performance across time, we found that the engagement is lost and the participants reported more answers related to boredom.