Analyzing the relationship between pressure sensitivity and player experience

Abstract

This paper summarizes the findings of a study about patterns between the levels of pressure exerted on a gamepad's buttons and the way that players feel when playing. We designed an experiment to trigger different emotions (boredom, frustration, fun) from players when playing a 2D space shooter and analyzed the relationship between pressure and experience. Results show clear trends and a close correlation between pressure and specific players' aspects. Older players tended to press the button harder and players with more experience tended to press it softer. We also found out that there is a strong correlation between pressure and aspects such as difficulty, fun, arousal and dominance, being the correlation: pressure/fun (76.92%) and pressure/dominance (78.57%) the most relevant ones. Finally, frustration, boredom and valence had unclear results, however, trends showed the following: the more frustration, the harder players pressed the button, boredom has an inversely proportional relation with pressure and the results for valence were 61.54% positive, without having a solid final conclusion about this parameter. We propose a parameters classification to carry on with this result in our next step and show how could we design an effective estimation method in the future.