The first part of my PhD project has been accepted as a Work-in-Progress paper at CHI PLAY 2026.

The work introduces affordance-level attentional structure as a unit of analysis for player experience research. Instead of reading emotion off a physiological signal, it asks how a game’s recurring, designer-controlled affordances — interaction, combat, reward, pacing, decision-making — jointly shape a player’s overall arousal. Using electrodermal activity recorded across two structurally contrasting commercial games, it treats ridge regression as an interpretable lens rather than a predictive tool, and finds that arousal-linked attention tracks the demand to act under constraint more than the mere presence of narrative or spectacle.

August 2026 Updates

• Accepted at CHI PLAY 2026
  Work-in-Progress track, York, UK
• Poster & references available now
  Everything below is live — this is where the poster QR code leads
• Final paper & ACM DOI — forthcoming
  This page will be updated with the official DOI and a link to the published article as soon as the proceedings are online

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How to cite

References

The five references shown on the poster are marked; the full list below supports the work.

1. Aslam, H., & Brown, J. A. (2022). Affordance Theory in Game Design. Springer.
2. Bansal, G., et al. (2021). Does the whole exceed its parts? The effect of AI explanations on complementary team performance. CHI 2021. ACM.
3. Boucsein, W. (2012). Electrodermal Activity (2nd ed.). Springer.
4. Braithwaite, J. J., Watson, D. G., Jones, R., & Rowe, M. (2013). A Guide for Analysing Electrodermal Activity (EDA) and Skin Conductance Responses (SCRs). University of Birmingham.
5. Cacioppo, J. T., Tassinary, L. G., & Berntson, G. G. (Eds.). (2007). Handbook of Psychophysiology (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
6. Cardona-Rivera, R. E., & Young, R. M. (2014). A cognitivist theory of affordances for games. DiGRA 2013.
7. Corbetta, M., & Shulman, G. L. (2002). Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3(3), 201–215.
8. Dawson, M. E., Schell, A. M., & Filion, D. L. (2007). The electrodermal system. In Handbook of Psychophysiology (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
9. Drachen, A., Nacke, L. E., Yannakakis, G., & Pedersen, A. L. (2010). Correlation between heart rate, electrodermal activity and player experience in first-person shooter games. ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Video Games, 49–54.
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20. Mandryk, R. L., & Atkins, M. S. (2007). A fuzzy physiological approach for continuously modeling emotion during interaction with play technologies. IJHCS, 65(4), 329–347.
21. Mirza-Babaei, P., Nacke, L. E., Gregory, J., Collins, N., & Fitzpatrick, G. (2013). How does it play better? Exploring user testing and biometric storyboards in games user research. CHI 2013, 1499–1508.
22. Nacke, L. E., Kalyn, M., Lough, C., & Mandryk, R. L. (2011). Biofeedback game design: Using direct and indirect physiological control to enhance game interaction. CHI 2011, 103–112.
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