Can Context Awareness and Affective Computing Inform Mobile Games User Research?

Mobile games can be used anytime and anywhere, therefore user context and behavior are important variables for evaluating the gameplay experience. In addition, the emotions that arise during gameplay constitute an important aspect in mobile game user research. This paper presents the position that it is possible to collect information on both, by leveraging on the data available through mobile phone sensing, thus providing a non intrusive and versatile solution for automatic evaluation of contextual game user experiences. In the following, a conceptual framework to automatically collect and analyze information about context and user emotions is presented, with the purpose to study techniques for automatically inferring gameplay experience metrics such as flow, immersion and presence. This represents a work-in-progress study to demonstrate the feasibility of this research direction.