Hello, everyone The game I’ll introduce you today is “Narrative-based
Facial Expression Game for Emotional Development of Adolescents: Evoker”
Humans have six fundamental emotions and facial expressions convey emotional contexts and
reflect one’s psychological state.
It means that facial expressions play a decisive social function in interpersonal communication
and relationships.
However, COVID-19 has completely changed our everyday life, especially the way of communication.
As adolescents were unable to experience enough social relationships and emotional contexts,
the number of adolescents with psychiatric disorders increased.
Following those statements, we chose adolescents as target players who are still very sensitive
and vulnerable in developing emotion.
Wearing masks everyday hinders the chance to see and understand one’s facial expressions
during conversations We found that “emotions can be generated
internally and externally through actions, and external actions ,such as making facial
expressions , also can lead to generate the emotions.”
Based on the background I mentioned, we design a narrative-based game that uses realtime
facial expression recognition.
Players use facial expressions as a new interface in this game.
For facial expression recognition, we use the FER4 module implemented in Python.
FER computes the statistical confidence scores over 7 emotions (6 basic emotions and neutrality)
from a given face image so that each confidence score is in range between 0 and 1.
Players identify emotion from narrative contexts in missions, and make a facial expression
appropriate for the context to clear the challenges.
Our game provides an opportunity to practice reading emotional contexts and expressing
appropriate emotions, which has a high potential for promoting emotional development of our
target users.
This game aims to increase the player's sense of immersion by constructing a complete universe.
Observers of emotion monopoly company take away the feelings of people in the town.
The player is the only person in the town who remembers emotions.
Therefore, in this game, player should tell people proper facial expressions that suit
the situation and eventually defeat the emotion monopoly company and return town lively again.
Based on the five basic human emotions, we have 5 different situations.
happiness, Sadness, Anger, Surprise, and Disgust Context is given by the NPCs with nonverbal
cues like voices and gestures.
For instance, Joy of cheering with friends is expressing with SFX + cheering actions
and Sadness of the pain of loss with sobering SFX + actions.
As some emotions are rarely expressed in daily, such as disgust can not be fully natural to
players.
so we set the threshold of each emotions before the pilot tests.
Total 11 participants age 17~22 are participated and have done the play test.
As you can see in the table, we got positive feedback in 4 total categories.
It has three contributions, First, It is educational.
we expect the educational effect that the players can understand their feelings by voluntarily
making facial expressions, and further enhance their understanding of others.
Second, It uses innovative interface. By using facial expressions as an interface,
it aims to provide universal accessibility and opportunities to practice real-life experiences
through natural interfaces.
Third, It has its own Originality.
We understanding the current COVID19 situation, and design the game to practice facial
expressions from decreasing chance to read other’s facial expressions.
This is the end of my presentation.
Thank you for your attention.