A Tool to Support Players Affective States Assessment Based on Facial Expressions Analysis

Digital games are played by a large variety of players with different profiles and backgrounds. Understanding their reactions and experiences while playing is crucial to support game expansion or creation. This paper presents a tool to support affective states assessment based on facial analysis. It allows the configuration of different testing scenarios to gather in-game information as well as webcam feed for the facial expressions analysis and further affective reaction processing. Also, it outputs all the data collected and processed into three different formats: graphs, videos and CSV files. Experimental tests with a 2D puzzle game were made to demonstrate that the tool is able to gather and properly provide information about players’ affective experience.