The Aiming Game: Using a Game with Biofeedback for Training in Emotion Regulation

The Aiming Game is a 2D shooter serious game built in Unity that uses EEG and EMG biofeedback from an Emotiv EPOC headset to train players to recognize and regulate their emotional arousal. Developed within the xDELIA project and aimed at financial investors, the game adapts its difficulty and visual distortions, such as aiming offset and target blur, to the player's arousal level, and introduces visual and auditory distractors in later phases to induce stress. The underlying premise is that these regulation skills will transfer to real trading behavior, although the authors explicitly acknowledge that this transfer has not yet been empirically demonstrated.

The game's technical design combines timed spawning of targets and distractors with a scoring system (+10 for target hits, -10 for distractor hits, -2 per shot) and logs arousal on a 1-5 scale alongside shot outcomes. Evaluation through heuristic review and play testing with six participants yielded informative but preliminary results. Five of six players reported awareness of their arousal through the on-screen arousal bar, even though eye tracking showed almost no direct gaze at it, suggesting that awareness may come from peripheral or indirect processing. All participants found aiming rough and noticed a delay between shooting and hit registration, while the red distractor planes disrupted tactics and generated complaints about repetitiveness. Reported affective measures, such as tension (M = 4) and low happiness (M = 2), are not statistically meaningful given the small sample.

Taken together, the first iteration succeeded in producing a prioritized backlog of design flaws for the second round of development, although evaluators and players often disagreed about which problems mattered most. Testers were largely students and colleagues rather than the financial-investor target group, and players frequently described the game as boring. The authors therefore recommend increasing complexity and tying progression to player performance rather than elapsed time, with validation among the intended audience as an essential next step.