The importance of affect in delivering engaging experiences in entertainment and educational games is well recognized. Yet, current techniques for building affect-aware games are limited, with the maintenance and use of affect in essence being handcrafted for each game. The Koko architecture describes a service-oriented middleware that reduces the burden of incorporating affect recognition into games, thereby enabling developers to concentrate on the functional and creative aspects of their applications. The Koko architecture makes three key contributions: (1) improving developer productivity by creating a reusable and extensible environment; (2) yielding an enhanced user experience by enabling independently developed games and other applications to collaborate and provide a more coherent user experience than currently possible; (3) enabling affective communication in multiplayer and social games. Further, Koko is intended to be used as an extension of existing game architectures. We r...
Derek J. Sollenberger, Munindar P. Singh