Psychophysiological Game Testing Lecture at Quo Vadis Developer Conference in Berlin

by The Acagamic

After hav­ing the great chance to speak in Helsinki at our recent FUGA project meet­ing about Game Design and Player Emotions, where I talked about using psy­chophys­i­o­log­i­cal mea­sure­ments to val­i­date game design ele­ments for spe­cific player emo­tions, I had the plea­sure of being invited to Germany’s Quo Vadis Entwicklerkonferenz (game devel­op­ers conference).

While last year, I could only inter­est a small num­ber of peo­ple for the topic of our European Community FP6 NEST project: The Fun of Gaming: Measuring the Human Experience of Media Enjoyment. This year was dif­fer­ent. I was sur­prised and very happy to see my talk jam-packed full with more than 80 inter­ested peo­ple from the German games indus­try, research, and education.

Thanks to for­mer Gamestar scribe Peter from the games sec­tion at Golem and a remark I made about Lara Croft’s butt, the talk has cre­ated a decent media echo in Germany.

However, unfor­tu­nately the press text peo­ple all some­how totally for­got to men­tion that my work is done within an EU project, which I clearly stated dur­ing my talk and espe­cially at the end. Now, I would really like to empha­size this fact, since none of our ground­break­ing work could be pos­si­ble with­out the sup­port of all our European part­ners! Also, the sites got the link to our research group wrong and directly link to bth.se, from which the Game and Media Arts Laboratory is quite hard to find.

Well, except for the minor glitches in detail and accu­racy (for exam­ple we use EMG for mea­sur­ing emo­tions, not GSR) in the text, I am pretty thank­ful for all the great feed­back on talk­ing at Quo Vadis and I am really excited about the fact that the game indus­try is look­ing towards aca­d­e­mic research with inter­est and respect in Germany.

Guess that means we are on the right track. Stay tuned as I will be putting up the slides of my talk very soon. And to those of you that came to Quo Vadis. Thanks for your inter­est and con­tact! For all oth­ers out there that are inter­ested in biofeed­back gam­ing, and using eye tracker and psy­chophys­i­o­log­i­cal meth­ods to test game­play fea­tures, feel free to drop me a line.

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