Affective games conventionally detect emotional states through physiological signals. However, this poses the issue of obtrusive data collection and the requirement for specialized sensors. Researchers have thus looked into other types of feedback, with a promising metric being the pressure exerted on an input device, which relates to emotional arousal. Despite this, no related work has attempted the implementation of such feedback yet.
To explore the gap in the research, this project investigates the possibility of integrating pressure as feedback in an affective game. The game performs Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) - i.e. continuously adjusts the difficulty to fit the individual player. Two DDA systems are developed, one being based on in-game performance and the other being based on exerted pressure.
From an evaluation of the two DDA systems and a game version with no DDA, it can be concluded that pressure-based DDA resulted in a more optimal game difficulty compared to no DDA. However, pressure-based DDA did not perform better than the other game versions in relation to the subjective player experience.