THROW out your Xbox, young couch potato! Active electronic games that can alter themselves to hold players鈥� interest are on the way from the University of Southern Denmark in Odense.
To find out what makes a game fun, 56 children aged between 8 and 10 were asked to play , a game in which they 鈥渟quashed鈥� lights that appeared on pressure-sensitive floor tiles. In different versions of the game, the bugs appeared at various rates and made different sounds.
The children were asked which versions they preferred, and the researchers combined their answers with measurements of their heart rate and how actively they played the game to create a program that predicts how much fun it is. They are planning games that monitor interest in real time and vary if the player gets bored.
Advertisement
