Serious games (SGs), which support the player to achieve learning targets and engage in learning activities through a fun experience, have been a flourishing field of research over the last decades. Their dual role as an educational and entertainment tool contributes to their widespread adoption and dissemination. Emotions play a key role in SGs and can be used in various ways to improve a player's experience and their learning outcomes or even contribute to a holistic UX evaluation. Even though SGs have several applications in the cultural heritage (CH) field and GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) institutions to improve their services, their impact has not been adequately studied. This chapter focuses on affective SGs and their use in GLAM institutions to contribute to improving their services. A review of SGs and aspects related to the integration of affective computing (AC) for developing affective SGs are also presented.
TopIntroduction
In recent decades, serious games (SGs), or applied games, have been gaining the increasing interest of the research community and have been widely adopted in many different fields, such as education and training both for youth and adults (Prensky, 2003; Mitchell & Savill-Smith, 2004; Gallegos, Kepple & Bukaty, 2016), health care (Aranha, Silva, Chaim & dos Santos Nunes, 2017), well-being (Nguyen et al., 2017), military (Lim, & Jung, 2013), interpersonal abilities (Romero, Usart, & Ott, 2015), cultural heritage (Bellotti, Berta, DeGloria, D’ursi & Fiore, 2013; Foni, Papagiannakis & Magnenat-Thalmann, 2010), etc. Therefore, several aspects of SGs, from game mechanics and game development to SGs evaluation, have been studied thoroughly.
SGs combine educational purposes with entertainment (Alvarez, Rampnoux, Jessel & Mathel, 2007), leading to increased engagement, focus, and motivation (Bellotti et al., 2013), thus optimizing User eXperience (UX) (Kalatha et al., 2018). In light of the above, SGs are a valuable educational and training tool (Prensky, 2003; Carvalho, 2017) that can complement or enhance traditional education (Ghoman & Schmölzer, 2020).
Emotion is an important parameter for both digital games, in general, and the learning process. As mentioned above, SGs combine the aspect of fun and learning, so the parameter emotion is especially crucial for them, as well.
In particular, emotion is a complex subjective conscious experience: the combination of mental states, psychosomatic expressions, and biological reactions of the body. Its duration lasts seconds to minutes (Kołakowska, Landowska, Szwoch, Szwoch, & Wróbel, 2013) and is divided into positive (satisfaction, joy, interest, happiness serenity) and negative (fear, anger, disgust, sadness). Both positive and negative emotions affect learning by leading a person to or away from the learning process (Ellis, H., & Ashbrook, P., 1988), terminating or leading to selective information processing and organizing the recall.
According to Hascher and Edlinger (2009) the perception that negative emotions have negative effects on learning, and positive emotions have positive effects is rather simplistic. However, it is commonly accepted that positive emotions facilitate self-regulated learning, affect curiosity and creative thinking, problem-solving, and generally enhance learning (Isen, 2004; Ahmed, Van der Werf, Kuyper, & Minnaert, 2013), whereas negative emotions lead to the manifestation of stress that may suspend learning. Nevertheless, some researchers contend that negative emotions may lead to a beneficial effect on learning outcomes (Barak, Watted, & Haick, 2016).