Designing and Utilizing Biofeedback Games for Emotion Regulation

Biofeedback games have the potential to make gaming a deeply personal experience by linking the gamespace to each player's physiological state. First, this paper describes the psycho-educational potential of the horror-themed biofeedback game Nevermind. In Nevermind, players' heart rate is continuously read into the game which in turn adapts to the player's momentary levels of negative affective arousal. Greater negative arousal causes the game and its horror-themed settings to become more disturbing. As a result, Nevermind challenges players to improve their emotion regulation skills by encouraging them to healthily down-regulate their negative affective states in the face of stressful situations. Second, Nevermind implements valuable design practices, practices which we share here. Finally, we describe a recent study conducted on 47 players. We discuss potential physiological metrics which may be useful for understanding how behaviors in the real world relate to those in biofeedback games like Nevermind.