SUBOTRON arcademy: Biometrics: A Critical Perspective /departure talk
Freitag, 30. Januar 2015 - 19:00 Uhr
RaumD / Q21
Psychophysiology is a branch of psychology that examines how body signals can give insight into internal psychological states. Basically, it is looking at the body to answer the question ?what are you thinking?? rather than relying on asking people, who may lie or not be able to articulate their internal states.
Relatively recently psychophysiology has begun to be applied in games. In this case it is often called biometrics and measures as skin conductance, eye-tracking, and even EEG have been used. Biometrics have been used both as a way to get more feedback from players during playtests, but also as a possible way for game control. Indeed, Gabe Newell at Valve has said that he believes biometrics for input and gaze tracking is going to turn out to be super important for games. However, due to their novelty and inherent impressiveness of the technology, there are often a lot of misconceptions about exactly how objective and useful biometrics are.
This talk will introduce biometrics and cover common biometric methods (eye-tracking, cardiovascular, skin conductance, and EEG). The focus will be on discussing these topics in as clear, and jargon free way as possible. The talk will outline the benefits of these methods, and their potential uses, but will also make clear the downsides and what cannot be achieved by these methods. What biometrics cannot do is something that is often glossed over by proponents of biometrics, and this talk is aimed at addressing that – while still pointing out the benefits. Balance is the goal.
Kurzbiographie
Ben works as a Games User Researcher at Player Research in the UK. Where he puts his 11+ years of research experience to good use helping game developers make the best games possible. Ben has a PhD in Human Factors Psychology from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and is originally from New Zealand. His past careers include being a freelance game journalist, government scientist, university lecturer, and, once upon a time, a zoo keeper.