Variations of Facial Actions While Playing Games with Inducing Boredom and Stress

This paper presents an experiment aimed at empirically exploring the variations of facial actions (FA) during gaming sessions with induced boredom and stress. Twenty adults with different ages and gaming experiences played three games while being recorded by a video camera and monitored by a heart rate sensor. The games were carefully designed to have a linear progression from a boring to a stressful state. Self-reported answers indicate participants perceived the games as being boring at the beginning and stressful at the end. The 6 hours of recordings of all subjects were manually analyzed and FA were annotated. We annotated FA that appeared in the recordings at least twice; annotations were categorized by the period when they happened (boring/stressful part of the games) and analysed on a group and on an individual level. Group level analysis revealed that FA patterns were related to no more than 25% of the subjects. The individual level analysis revealed particular patterns for 50% of the subjects. More FA annotations were made during the stressful part of the games. We conclude that, for the context of our experiment, FA provide an unclear foundation for detection of boredom/stressful states when observed from a group level perspective, while the individual level perspective might produce more information.