One of the fascinating things about the Oculus Rift headset is the way it forces players and developers to consider the body in relation to a game. A lot of the talk is about how to represent your avatar’s body. There are questions like whether it’s a problem when you look down and see “your” body but in the wrong clothes, and fascinating art projects designed around you being in someone else’s skin. But another avenue of exploration when it comes to incorporating bodies in gaming is biofeedback.
Brainwaves, breathing patterns, heart rate, blood pressure and so on can all be used to affect and to personalise the experience of gaming. Developer Robin Arnott has been using biofeedback in his work since Deep Sea, a game which monitored player breathing to control the scuba regulator sounds they would hear in-game. His current work is SoundSelf. It’s a meditative experience which is controlled through microphone input. Ostensibly that’s a voluntary process but it incorporates elements of biofeedback because breathing rate is tied to the user’s vocal input.
“I first seriously learned about biofeedback at a GDC talk from Valve’s in-house brain-scientist,” says Arnott. “They were giving heartbeat data from an EKG [a measurement of electric potential on the skin that correlates to heart beat] to an AI Director to dynamically tailor the game’s difficulty. This was years ago, and in my mind it has since seemed inevitable that gaming controllers would eventually include EKG and galvanic skin resistance detectors. They’re cheap, and they provide a treasure-trove of personalised data to feed into any game.”
If you’ve been keeping an eye on such developments you might know Erin Reynolds’ game Nevermind. It uses similar ideas in that if the game detects increased heart rate via a heart monitor strap the difficulty will increase. The idea with Reynolds’ work is that to progress efficiently you’ll need to find ways to remain calm while playing.
