A Design for Using Physiological Signals to Affect Team Game Play

This paper presents a prototype digital game that integrates team communication and psychophysiological measures as components of play. Our game, PhysiRogue, adds an affective dimension to the location-aware augmented reality game, Rogue Signals. We are using this experimental platform to explore the complementary roles of human-to-human and computer-to-human communication in team cognition. Physiological signals are acquired and processed to form psychophysiological measures. These measures affect game play both through team understanding and altered game mechanics. We are investigating the role of physiological state in immersion and implicit coordination in distributed teams. In PhysiRogue, a human team is split into two parts, each with access to different aspects of the game’s information. PhysiRogue’s implementation is a simulation of our location-aware game, Rouge Signals with the addition of psychophysiological measures. As components of the simulation, seekers, who form most of the human team, move in the “real world” and are “tracked” in an overlaid virtual world. The seekers, who must gather treasures in the “real world”, are chased in the virtual world by predators, which they cannot see. The coordinator is another human player who acts as the team leader and is not co-located with the seekers. The coordinator can only see the “virtual world” and thus can see the predators, but is limited to the perceptions of the network. Since the information contained on each side of the team is different, the two sides need to coordinate and communicate in order to succeed. This ability is limited due to cognitive bandwidth and the need for turn taking in meaningful verbal communication. Combined, the components of the system mimic the dynamic coordination requirements of real-life teams deployed in high-stress situations. With PhysiRogue we are integrating psychophysiological measures into digital game play. Electrodermal and electromyographic activity are simultaneously captured from players during game play. Such activity is indicative of increased attention, effort, and stress. The equipment used to measure this activity is portable and non-invasive. The physiological signals are processed to produce a real time “activation” level. Predators are able to track players based upon their “activation” levels, meaning that the computer opponents “sense” activation in the live players. They pursue seekers with higher “activation” levels. We hypothesize that this will lead to new game play strategies, a greater level of immersion, and new forms of focused involvement. In addition, visualizations of the seekers’ activation level provide the coordinator with additional team status information, affording the coordinator the ability to modify strategy more effectively. We are investigating designs for the visualization and the game mechanics, and how these factors affect team cognition and immersion.