Detecting player’s divided attention state during gameplay

• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigues, Marco Martins
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/24202
• topic: Videogames; Divided attention; Affective games; Human-computer interaction; Jogo de vídeo; Atenção dividida; Jogos afetivos; Interação homem-máquina

Serious games for health and teaching are becoming more common. These games have been evolving their methods of diagnosing, treating and teaching; however, not much previous work has been done relatively to the detection of the player’s attention state. This dissertation presents the design and testing of a system for the detection of divided attention state in players. The design of the system makes use of general game mechanics and events to analyse the player’s performance and, from that detect whether the player is dividing attention with another task. The proposed system was tested on a game designed and developed in the context of this dissertation. The obtained results show that the system is able to use performance features to identify the divided attention state of the player. This system is expected to help developers improve their games, making them more responsive, and also be a framework of development for other systems, specifically, for the detection of the attention state of the player.