justkiel

@mrmobius

Still learning the commenting format :) My response is further down.

@mrmobius

The blog provides the latest research and commentary on Physiological Computing: where physiological signals are used as an input control to a computer (e.g brain-computer interfaces, biofeedback, etc).

My research background is in affective games so the majority of my posts are on the topic. Since they announced the Vitality back in 2009 I've focused quite a bit on discussing what one can expect from Vitality in terms of games, sadly your just not going to get much from a finger based pulse oximeter given the ease in which motion artifacts are caused, see
http://www.physiologicalcomputing.net/wordpress/?tag=videogames for more posts.

Barring games we also focus on other interesting physiological interaction projects, for example Body Blogging and its role in gamification (i.e. using physiology as a motivation tool). You can find a video of a recent talk I give back in September on our current project http://vimeo.com/16649098.

If you want to know more you catch me on twitter at @justkiel.

@John Z

Viable physiological game mechanics have been around for a quite sometime now in the research community. Heck my first research paper on the topic is nearly a decade old now :) So it isn't that there's a lack of creativity in the field that would make this style of play interesting. Instead I would hazard a guess that its more likely that sensor deployment and the added value of such mechanics is what game developers are worried about.

If you check the last GDC presentations Valve have already been experimenting with biofeedback with L4D and Alien Swarm for sometime now (eye tracking with Portal). If your interested in knowing more about more engaging physiological games (beyond relaxation) I'd google the following authors Lennart Nacke, Kai Kai Kuikkaniemi and Alan Pope. Each has had a hand at developing more interesing game concepts with physiological input.

You can also find more material regarding physiological game mechanics on my own research website here, specifically on how you'd design interesting mechanics
http://www.physiologicalcomputing.net/wordpress/?tag=videogames

Here's a post that might be of interest, analysing whether Red Steel 3 is possible with the Wii Vitality:
http://www.physiologicalcomputing.net/wordpress/?p=452

@Anticrawl

Its not as daft as it sounds. The traditional approach to relaxation games (i.e. therapeutic) is to use the player's innate level of stress to control the games level of difficulty. However you can also engineer the game environment and social situation to provoke stress on purpose instead of relying on the player's innate level of stress. If you add a reward to the successful control of the measure being used to infer stress (e.g. heartbeat rate) it can add a new dimension to play when used in antagonistic environments such as a racing game.

Given the issues involved in physiological interaction, aiming to support 99% of your player base is an unrealistic goal to have as a game designer. For one not everyone's physiology responds in the exact same way (e.g. not everybody's heart rate increases to similar stresses).

As such if this is the approach Nintendo is going to take to the device I can't see it being released in the foreseable future, which as a researcher in this field is kind of disappointing to hear.

While relaxation games aren't everyones cup of tea there are variations which can be quite engaging (e.g. competitive relaxation, imagine you could only gain speed boosts in a racing game by relaxing, rather tricky given the environment thereby adding a new dimension to the game challenge).

You can find out more about why 99% is an unrealsitic figure here
http://www.physiologicalcomputing.net/wordpress/?p=1481