Evoking and Measuring Arousal in Game Settings

Serious games seem to be more effective if the participant feels more involved in the game. The participant should experience a high sense of presence which can be obtained by matching the level of excitement to the level of arousal a participant experiences. The level of arousal should be measured at runtime to make the game adaptive to the participant’s physiological state. In this paper an experiment is presented that has as main goal to see whether it is possible to evoke arousal during different types of computer games and to monitor the physiological response. Using three online games, participants reported different levels of stress and understanding between games. Furthermore, an increase of skin conductance was found as well as a decrease in heart rate for the most difficult to understand game.