Serious Games and Affective Gaming : Affective avatars and the play-motivation in serious gaming

This study aims to explore the question, how the use of applied gaming aspects through affective gaming, specifically as affective avatars, can promote an increment in play-motivation compared to today’s serious gaming. Similar studies in different fields have already shown, that the use of serious gaming can have a very positive impact on the motivation. This study should provide an initial step towards applying serious gaming and gamification through affective computing, for a more efficient motivational educating. By combining the fun of gaming, serious part and the affective avatar gaming, a much higher informational and motivational result could be achieved. A quantitative method was used to collect the data from 18 participants, participating in the research study. The participants were separated into three groups, equally distributed between experienced video game players and non-experienced ones, playing three different game versions, including and excluding affective elements. The collected and analysed data indicates, that participants do seemingly show a slightly higher play-motivation by having an affective avatar interaction. The gained result from this study could potentially show a new path of using affective avatars in a serious gaming setting and strengthen its possible potential