Towards Emotionally Adapted Games Based on User Controlled Emotion Knobs

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for personalizing video games so that players can deliberately facilitate or avoid particular emotional states during play. The central idea is an "emotion knob," a user-controlled mechanism that adjusts a game's emotional impact along the valence and arousal dimensions of a circumplex model of emotion. The framework rests on Psychological Customization, which tailors how information is presented, including interface layout, modality, narrative structure, and pacing, to produce desired transient psychological effects such as emotion, attention, and presence. The authors position the work as a theoretical and architectural contribution rather than an empirical study, and they explicitly state that clear design recommendations are beyond its scope.

The analysis maps emotional regulation possibilities across a three-by-three grid of arousal and valence states, identifying which emotional experiences are plausibly adjustable and which are likely to indicate poor gameplay. Transient narrative emotions such as fear, satisfaction, and aggression are seen as the most natural targets for manipulation through event and character structures, while the elimination of basic emotions is judged less feasible than controlling their intensity. The authors note that the appropriate use of the emotion knob depends heavily on game genre, with a driving game and a first-person shooter responding to arousal adjustments in very different ways.

On the technical side, the paper proposes an emotion feedback middleware that runs parallel to a conventional game engine. This middleware would process real-time biofeedback sensor data, apply emotional balancing rules tailored to player profile types, and feed outputs back into the game logic, synthetic agent behavior, physics, or rendering layers. The architecture is grounded in the authors' prior work on Mind-Based Technologies and individual differences in information processing.

The paper is explicit about its limitations. It acknowledges that the feasibility of the emotion knob has not been empirically established, that the relationship between flow experience and emotional states remains thinly supported, and that a high-arousal setting might paradoxically produce disappointment if it falls short of expectations. The authors frame their contribution as a research agenda that calls for systematic empirical studies of user profiles, presentation forms, and psychological effects in gaming contexts.