Psychophysiological measurements have so far been used to express player experience quantitatively in game genres such as shooter games and race games. However, these methods have not yet been applied to casual video games. From a development point of view, games developed in the casual sector of the games industry are characterized by very short production cycles which make them ill-suited for complex and lengthy psychophysiological testing regimes. This paper discusses some methodological innovations that lead to the application of psychophysiological measurements to enhance the design of a commercially released casual game for the Apple iPad, called 'Gua-Le-Ni'; or, The Horrendous Parade'. The game was tested in different stages of its development to dry-run a cycle of design improvements derived from psychophysiological data. The tests looked at the correlation between stress levels and the contraction of facial muscles with in-game performance in order to establish whether 'Gua-Le-Ni' offered the cognitive challenge, the learning curve, and the enjoyment the designers had in mind for this product. In this paper, we discuss the changes that were made to the game and the data-analysis that led to these changes.
Over the past few years a growing number of artists have critiqued the ubiquity of identity recognition technologies. Specifically, the use of these technologies by state security programs, tech-giants and multinational corporations has met with opposition and controversy. A popular form of resistance to recognition technology is sought in strategies of masking and camouflage. Zach Blas, Leo Selvaggio, Sterling Crispin and Adam Harvey are among a group of internationally acclaimed artists who have developed subversive anti-facial recognition masks that disrupt identification technologies. This paper examines the ontological underpinnings of these popular and widely exhibited mask projects. Over and against a binary understanding and criticism of identity recognition technology, I propose to take a relational turn to reimagine these technologies not as an object for our eyes, but as a relationship between living organisms and things. A relational perspective cuts through dualist and anthropocentric conceptions of recognition technology opening pathways to intersectional forms of resistance and critique. Moreover, if human-machine relationships are to be understood as coming into being in mutual dependency, if the boundaries between online and offline are always already blurred, if the human and the machine live intertwined lives and it is no longer clear where the one stops and the other starts, we need to revise our understanding of the self. A relational understanding of recognition technology moves away from a notion of the self as an isolated and demarcated entity in favour of an understanding of the self as relationally connected, embedded and interdependent. This could alter the way we relate to machines and multiplies the lines of flight we can take out of a culture of calculated settings.
We examined the neural correlates of facial attractiveness by presenting pictures of male or female faces (neutral expression) with low/intermediate/high attractiveness to 48 male or female participants while recording their electroencephalogram (EEG). Subjective attractiveness ratings were used to determine the 10% highest, 10% middlemost, and 10% lowest rated faces for each individual participant to allow for high contrast comparisons. These were then split into preferred and dispreferred gender categories. ERP components P1, N1, P2, N2, early posterior negativity (EPN), P300 and late positive potential (LPP) (up until 3000 ms post-stimulus), and the face specific N170 were analysed. A salience effect (attractive/unattractive > intermediate) in an early LPP interval (450–850 ms) and a long-lasting valence related effect (attractive > unattractive) in a late LPP interval (1000–3000 ms) were elicited by the preferred gender faces but not by the dispreferred gender faces. Multi-variate pattern analysis (MVPA)-classifications on whole-brain single-trial EEG patterns further confirmed these salience and valence effects. It is concluded that, facial attractiveness elicits neural responses that are indicative of valenced experiences, but only if these faces are considered relevant. These experiences take time to develop and last well beyond the interval that is commonly explored.
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