When designing computer games, one is often interested in evoking feelings of
engagement, enjoyment and challenge in the player. One way of doing so is
dynamically adjusting the difficulty of the game. Traditionally, this adjustment
has been based on the performance of the player. However, in recent years there
has been an increased interest in dynamically adjusting the difficulty level of a
game based on physiological signals from the player. In this Bachelor’s project,
we have studied the effect of using an electrodermal activity (EDA) wristband
sensor as the source signal for the difficulty adjustment algorithm and compared
it to the traditional approach of using the performance of the player.
We developed two Tetris games, one EDA controlled and one performance controlled,
and let participants play them both. Each game session was followed
by a questionnaire. Our results show that, although participants reported an
increased sense of engagement and challenge when playing the EDA version,
further research is necessary before the usefulness of EDA in this setting can be
established.