Special Issue on Emotion in Games - IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing

CALL FOR PAPERS

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AFFECTIVE COMPUTING 

Special Issue on Emotion in Games

Computer games research has recently experienced the adoption of its own
technological advancements (rich interactivity, 3D graphical visualization
and role playing game-style incentive structures) by an increasing number of
domains (e-commerce, news reading, web 2.0 services, and human-computer
interfaces). The capability of games delivering enhanced user immersion and
engagement defines the driving force behind this adoption. Inevitably, games
are unique elicitors of emotion and the study of user experience in those
environments is of paramount importance for the understanding of gameplay
internal mechanics.

Analysing, capturing and synthesizing player experience has been a
challenging area within the crossroads of cognitive science, psychology,
artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Additional gameplay
input modalities such as 3D acceleration (e.g. Wii), image and speech (e.g.
Kinect) enhance the importance of the study and the complexity of player
experience. Sophisticated techniques from artificial and computational
intelligence can be used to synthesize the affective state of player (and
non-player) characters, based on multiple modalities of player-game
interaction. Multiple modalities of input can also provide a novel means for
game platforms to measure player satisfaction and engagement when playing,
without necessarily having to resort to postplay and off-line
questionnaires. Adaptation techniques such as complex (emotional and social)
agent behaviours can also be used to maximize player’s experience, thereby,
closing the affective game loop. In addition to this, procedural content
generation techniques may be employed, based on the level of user engagement
and interest, to dynamically produce new, adaptable and personalized
content.

This special issue aims at bringing together contributions from specialists
in affective computing, artificial intelligence, user experience research
and multi-modal interfaces that will advance the state-of-the-art in player
experience research; affect induction, sensing and modelling; and
affect-driven game adaptation. Research areas relevant to the special issue
include, but are not limited to, the following:

• modelling affect in the context of games
• artificial and computational intelligence for modelling player experience
• cognitive/affective models of player satisfaction/immersion/engagement
• analysis of player’s facial expressions, hand and body gestures, body stance, gaze and physiology
• speech recognition and prosody analysis of players
• mapping low-level cues to affect and emotion
• using games to record affective databases
• reproducing player affect in the game environment
• affective game characters
• adaptive learning and player experience
• affect-driven procedural content generation
• affect expression in games
• methods for emotion measurement in games

Submissions must not have been previously published, with the exception that
substantial extensions of conference papers can be considered. The authors
will be required to follow the Author’s Guide for manuscript submission to
the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing at:
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tac/author . Full manuscripts should be
submitted electronically through IEEE’s Manuscript Central:
https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/taffc-cs . Be sure to select “Special Issue
on Emotion in Games” as the Manuscript Type, rather than “Regular Paper.”
This will ensure that your paper is directed to the special issue editors.
IEEE Tools for Authors are available online at:
http://www.ieee.org/organizations/pubs/transactions/information.htm .
Inquiries can be directed to toac@computer.org.

*Schedule*
Submission deadline: August 1, 2012
Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2013
Final Manuscripts Due: March 1, 2013
Publication: July/September 2013

*Special issue editors*
Georgios N. Yannakakis, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Katherine Isbister, NYU-Poly, USA
Ana Paiva, INESC-ID, Portugal
Kostas Karpouzis,National Technical University of Athens, Greece