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An archive of the interview is available here.
The Critical Bit was given the opportunity to interview Mike Ambinder, Valve's resident psychologist and game designer.
[box="center"]
Emotion measured as a vector on a 2D plane[/box]
Mike performs data analysis on Valve's internal game playtests, experiments with bio feedback, and does a multitude of other cool things.
More specifically, Mike said that he wraps his brain around "how to foster cooperation/competition among players, creating reward/reinforcement rations, manipulating visual attention onscreen, designing experiments for the TF2 economy, evaluating the bias in our internal review systems, etc."
These days he focuses more on measuring skin conductance, using sensors that "you can build... for about $5." Skin conductance can tell us a persons psychological arousal state at the time.
In the future, these sensors could be used as an input device, and it will allow your games to dynamically direct the AI or play certain types of music depending on your arousal state. It's very affordable and certainly cheap enough to put into mass produced game controllers.
But Mike said that Valve's still not sure of what the exact benefits are of creating such hardware or creating that type of dynamic experience. "Our initial experiments have shown that the potential exists, and we're going to keep performing them until we create a viable product, or we end up realizing that we're wasting our time."
There's a lot more interview at The Critcical Bit's website.
And if you're like me and you're interested in this technical stuff that comes out of Valve, you can find a lot of material on their various technologies and experiments. You can find a list of them on Valve's website.
The Critical Bit was given the opportunity to interview Mike Ambinder, Valve's resident psychologist and game designer.
[box="center"]
Emotion measured as a vector on a 2D plane[/box]
Mike performs data analysis on Valve's internal game playtests, experiments with bio feedback, and does a multitude of other cool things.
More specifically, Mike said that he wraps his brain around "how to foster cooperation/competition among players, creating reward/reinforcement rations, manipulating visual attention onscreen, designing experiments for the TF2 economy, evaluating the bias in our internal review systems, etc."
These days he focuses more on measuring skin conductance, using sensors that "you can build... for about $5." Skin conductance can tell us a persons psychological arousal state at the time.
In the future, these sensors could be used as an input device, and it will allow your games to dynamically direct the AI or play certain types of music depending on your arousal state. It's very affordable and certainly cheap enough to put into mass produced game controllers.
But Mike said that Valve's still not sure of what the exact benefits are of creating such hardware or creating that type of dynamic experience. "Our initial experiments have shown that the potential exists, and we're going to keep performing them until we create a viable product, or we end up realizing that we're wasting our time."
There's a lot more interview at The Critcical Bit's website.
And if you're like me and you're interested in this technical stuff that comes out of Valve, you can find a lot of material on their various technologies and experiments. You can find a list of them on Valve's website.
