CALL FOR PAPERS
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AFFECTIVE COMPUTING
Special Issue on Emotion in Games

Computer games research has recently experienced the adoption of its own technological advancements (rich interactivity, 3D graphical visualization and role playing game-style incentive structures) by an increasing number of domains (e-commerce, news reading, web 2.0 services, and human-computer interfaces). The capability of games delivering enhanced user immersion and engagement defines the driving force behind this adoption. Inevitably, games are unique elicitors of emotion and the study of user experience in those environments is of paramount importance for the understanding of gameplay internal mechanics.

Analysing, capturing and synthesizing player experience has been a challenging area within the crossroads of cognitive science, psychology, artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Additional gameplay input modalities such as 3D acceleration (e.g. Wii), image and speech (e.g. Kinect) enhance the importance of the study and the complexity of player experience. Sophisticated techniques from artificial and computational intelligence can be used to synthesize the affective state of player (and non-player) characters, based on multiple modalities of player-game interaction. Multiple modalities of input can also provide a novel means for game platforms to measure player satisfaction and engagement when playing, without necessarily having to resort to postplay and off-line questionnaires. Adaptation techniques such as complex (emotional and social) agent behaviours can also be used to maximize player’s experience, thereby, closing the affective game loop. In addition to this, procedural content generation techniques may be employed, based on the level of user engagement and interest, to dynamically produce new, adaptable and personalized content.

This special issue aims at bringing together contributions from specialists in affective computing, artificial intelligence, user experience research and multi-modal interfaces that will advance the state-of-the-art in player experience research; affect induction, sensing and modelling; and affect-driven game adaptation. Research areas relevant to the special issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

• modelling affect in the context of games
• artificial and computational intelligence for modelling player experience
• cognitive/affective models of player satisfaction/immersion/engagement
• analysis of player’s facial expressions, hand and body gestures, body stance, gaze and physiology
• speech recognition and prosody analysis of players
• mapping low-level cues to affect and emotion
• using games to record affective databases
• reproducing player affect in the game environment
• affective game characters
• adaptive learning and player experience
• affect-driven procedural content generation
• affect expression in games
• methods for emotion measurement in games

Submissions must not have been previously published, with the exception that substantial extensions of conference papers can be considered. The authors will be required to follow the Author’s Guide for manuscript submission to the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing at: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tac/author. Full manuscripts should be submitted electronically through IEEE’s Manuscript Central: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/taffc-cs. Be sure to select “Special Issue on Emotion in Games” as the Manuscript Type, rather than “Regular Paper.” This will ensure that your paper is directed to the special issue editors. IEEE Tools for Authors are available online at: http://www.ieee.org/organizations/pubs/transactions/information.htm. Inquiries can be directed to toac@computer.org.

Schedule
Submission deadline (extended): September 15, 2012
Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2013
Final Manuscripts Due: March 1, 2013
Publication: July/September 2013

Special issue editors
Georgios N. Yannakakis, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Katherine Isbister, NYU-Poly, USA
Ana Paiva, INESC-ID, Portugal
Kostas Karpouzis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece