Arousal Level Determination in Video Game Playing Using Galvanic Skin Response

Abstract

Potentials for making computer games more engaging are put forward with reliable improvements in technologies for emotional recognition of human beings. Galvanic skin response is a nonintrusive easily captured physiological signal which is an indicator of autonomic nerve response as a parameter of the sweat gland function. It is oftenly used to evaluate the affective state of user’s stress and arousal level. In this paper galvanic skin response was studied for two different tasks of playing a videogame namely, playing games of his own choice and other not of his choice with varied difficulty levels. Frequencies produced corresponding to galvanic skin response variation, against variations in difficulty levels encountered during video game playing found varying in a wide range of 29 Hz to 120 Hz depending on the expertise and comfort level of player. We used GSR measurement module by Biokit India and the frequency was observed using digital oscilloscope, Tektronix MSO 2014 which is enabled with the feature of saving signal in USB flash drive. PASW was used as statistical methods to analyse the signals which showed a 10 % rise in galvanic skin response as the difficulty level is increased in terms of obstacles and time. Important thing was observed that frequency of arousals increased with number of obstacles, while magnitude of arousals increased with type of difficulty involved in crossing obstacles.