It's all in the game: Towards an affect sensitive and context aware game companion

Robot companions must be able to display social, affective behaviour. As a prerequisite for companionship, the ability to sustain long-term interactions with users requires companions to be endowed with affect recognition abilities. This paper explores application-dependent user states in a naturalistic scenario where an iCat robot plays chess with children. In this scenario, the role of context is investigated for the modelling of user states related both to the task and the social interaction with the robot. Results show that contextual features related to the game and the iCat's behaviour are successful in helping to discriminate among the identified states. In particular, state and evolution of the game and display of facial expressions by the iCat proved to be the most significant: when the user is winning and improving in the game her feeling is more likely to be positive and when the iCat displays a facial expression during the game the user's level of engagement with the iCat is higher. These findings will provide the foundation for a rigorous design of an affect recognition system for a game companion.