Pleasure in Play: Hyperscanning Shared Card Game Experience

This paper, presented at DiGRA 2026, reports an interdisciplinary study examining how game mechanics shape players' emotional, social, and neural responses during collaborative play. The authors developed 501, a trick-taking card game with experimental mechanics allowing both cooperative and solo roles, and adapted it into a computerized three-player format for EEG hyperscanning, which records brain activity from multiple participants simultaneously. The central aim is to link inter-brain synchrony, a measure of how aligned players' neural signals are, to game events, player roles, and subjective experience.

The study recorded 32-channel EEG from 66 participants across two roughly 20-minute rounds of play, synchronized with detailed event markers for card order, choices, and role shifts. Pre- and post-session questionnaires measured mood, arousal, prosocialness, empathy, perceived connectedness, and aesthetic-emotional experience, the latter categorized into five experience types: Harmonious, Novel, Transformative, Disengaged, and Negative. Preliminary results show consistent event-related potentials for game actions and significant differences across player roles in frontal, central, and lateral electrodes. Players showed significant increases in positive mood and emotional arousal after play, though broader prosocial and social-closeness measures did not change overall. Differences emerged by experience type: Harmonious players showed increased empathic concern, Transformative players reported feeling less close to others, and decision times varied significantly across groups.

The authors present these findings as preliminary, suggesting that both subjective experience and role-specific events can be linked to behavioral and neural responses. They frame the work as a step toward designing collaborative play experiences and understanding how shared play might influence social interaction beyond the game.