Towards Emotionally Adapted Games Timo Saari, Niklas Ravaja, Jari Laarni, Kari Kallinen, Marko Turpeinen M.I.N.D. Lab/CKIR/HSE & HIIT, CKIR/Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology {saari@hkkk.fi, ravaja@hkkk.fi, laarni@hkkk.fi, kallinen@hkkk.fi, marko.turpeinen@hiit.fi} Abstract In this paper, we present a framework for a gaming personalization system to systematically facilitate desired emotional states of individual players of games. Psychological Customization entails personalization of the way of presenting information (user interface, visual layouts, modalities, narrative structures and other factors) per user or user group to create desired transient psychological effects and states, such as emotion, attention, involvement, presence, persuasion and learning. By varying the form of information presented in a game in an emotionally intelligent way it may be possible to achieve such effects. Theory, key concepts, available empiric evidence and an example of an application area in emotional gaming as well as a basic system design are presented. 1. Introduction Gaming research is often conducted on the basis of game content and genre analysis, typologies of gaming styles or consumption and sales of games. Little research is done on the actual user experience of games, such as presence and emotion. Most of this research does not conceptualize user experience, such as emotion, sufficiently from the point of view of emotion psychology. It is often also concentrating on some overly technical aspects of gaming such as ways to detect emotions of players with sensor technology. Further, very little research is available to understand how various individual differences may influence emotions during gaming. Also, the emotional influence of the way of presenting the basic elements of a game has not sufficiently been studied. The field also lacks a more general framework of seeing how one may match individual differences to the way of presenting and adapting games to create emotional effects. This article explores these issues and attempts to provide a preliminary approach to understand emotionally adapted games. User experience is seen within this article as the transient attentional and emotional states, presence, moods, information processing, learning, flow, persuasion and various other subjective experiences occurring i) just before a user engages with technology, ii) as a result of the user perceiving and processing information mediated by technology during a session of use and iii) immediately after the use of technology within a given task and context of use. User experience is related to action, i.e. the user has an experience and may perform a certain action or decide not to act, i.e. the user has creative and autonomous degrees of freedom for action. When perceiving external stimuli like information or a game via a communication technology users have a feeling of presence. In presence, the mediated information becomes the focused object of perception, while the immediate, external context, including the technological device, fades into the background [3, 28, 29]. Empirical studies show that information experienced in presence has real psychological effects on perceivers, such as emotional responses based on the events described or cognitive processing and learning from the events [see 40]. It is likely that when playing games people experience presence with the content of the game. 2. Psychological Customization Media- and communication technologies, such as systems for gaming, as special cases of information technology may be considered as consisting of three layers [1]. At the bottom lies a physical layer that includes the physical technological device and the connection channel that is used to transmit communication signals. In the middle is a code layer that consists of the protocols and software that make the physical layer run. At the top is a content layer that consists of multimodal information. The content layer includes both the substance and the form of multimedia content [2, 44]. Substance refers to the core message of the information. Form implies aesthetic and expressive ways of organizing the substance, such as using different modalities and structures of information [44]. Naturally, these are difficult to separate. Technologies are most often designed from the point of view of available communication capacity, software and hardware around a certain task. In addition to this there is another approach to design of technology taking into account the user experience of the users of technology and the goals users may have regarding a certain technology. For instance, a user may wish to perform a certain task as efficiently as possible, or a user may wish to be in a good mood when performing the task. Hence, there is another PRESENCE 2004 182