Who said that violent video games cannot promote calm behavior? Could we reverse engineer the difficulty system of a horror game to encourage the player to stay calm as opposed to feeling under constant pressure? To explore the feasibility of the approach and its effectiveness, we created a horror game, Caroline , which uses the player’s biometric data to adapt the difficulty of the game: if the player is too stressed, the difficulty increases, and the opposite happens if the player is relaxed. We explored the effect of such an approach on players’ cognitive, emotional, performative, and decision-making challenge as well as their intrinsic motivation by comparing it to the base game without any dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA). Our results showed that players felt more motivated when the gameplay was adjusted according to their heart rate. However, out of the four types of challenge, the only one affected by the DDA was the decision-making challenge. We discuss what these findings mean for video game design and research into affective computing and provide suggestions for future research.

中文翻译：

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保持冷静，瞄准头部：恐怖游戏中生物反馈控制的动态难度调整

谁说暴力电子游戏不能促进冷静行为？我们能否对恐怖游戏的难度系统进行逆向工程，以鼓励玩家保持冷静，而不是感到持续的压力？为了探索该方法的可行性及其有效性，我们创建了一个恐怖游戏，Caroline，它使用玩家的生物识别数据来适应游戏的难度：如果玩家压力太大，难度就会增加，如果玩家放松，则会发生相反的情况。我们通过将这种方法与没有任何动态难度调整（DDA）的基础游戏进行比较，探讨了这种方法对玩家认知、情感、执行和决策挑战及其内在动机的影响。我们的结果表明，当根据心率调整游戏玩法时，玩家会感到更有动力。然而，在四种类型的挑战中，唯一受 DDA 影响的是决策挑战。我们讨论这些发现对视频游戏设计和情感计算研究的意义，并为未来的研究提供建议。