Multi-modal natural interaction in game design: a comparative analysis of player experience in a large scale role-playing game

Previous work on player experience research has focused on identifying the major factors involving content creation and interaction. This has encouraged a large investment in new types of physical interaction artefacts (e.g. Wiimote™, Rock Band™, Kinect™). However, these artefacts still require custom interaction schemes to be developed for them, which critically limits the number of commercial videogames and multimedia applications that can benefit from those. Moreover, there is currently no agreement as to which factors better describe the impact that natural and complex multi-modal user interaction schemes have on users’ experiences—a gap in part created by the limitations in adapting this type of interaction to existing software. Thus, this paper presents a generic middleware framework for multi-modal natural interfaces which enables game-independent data acquisition that encourages further advancement on this domain. Furthermore, our framework can then redefine the interaction scheme of any software tool by mapping body poses and voice commands to traditional input means (keyboard and mouse). We have focused on digital games, where the use of physical interaction artefacts has become mainstream. The validation methods for this tool consisted of a series of increasing difficulty stress tests, with a total of 25 participants. Also, a pilot study was conducted on a further 16 subjects which demonstrated mainly positive impact of natural interfaces on player’s experience. The results supporting this were acquired when subjects played a complex commercial role-playing game whose mechanics were adapted using our framework; statistical tests on the obtained Fun ratings, along with subjective participant opinions indicate that this kind of natural interaction indeed has a significant impact on player’s experience and enjoyment. However, different impact patterns emerge from this analysis, which seem to fit with standing theories of player experience and immersion.