Exploring Affective States in Trading Simulation Gaming through Facial Expression Analysis

Exploring Affective States in Trading Simulation Gaming through Facial Expression Analysis

Kemmers, Jessy Lee (TU Delft Technology, Policy and Management)

Delft University of Technology

Complex Systems Engineering and Management (CoSEM)

2020-11-13

Our world has faced rapid transformations over the past decades. This greatly facilitated advancements in interconnectedness of the functional systems in society, such as transportation or communication. Simulation gaming is a technique that can aid in comprehending the dynamics and interactions within these complex socio-technical systems. Simulation gaming became a very popular topic of research and many different aspects have already been thoroughly investigated. Yet, there are some components that still remained rather unexplored, such as affect among participants. Affect are the feelings, moods and emotional states that we, as individuals, can experience as a reaction to certain events and situations. The importance of researching the role of affect in simulation gaming can be attributed to the potential of affective gaming. Including a component that adapts to the affective states of participants can improve the gaming experience as well as the outcomes. This can provide a better understanding of the observed interactions and their complexity. Simulation gaming can be practiced for various purposes in different sectors. This research focuses on the role of affective states in trading simulation gaming. It provides the opportunity to analyze affective states experienced by participants and how that relates to trading behavior, such as decision making and negotiating. In order to study this, an existing simulation game was used to derive and analyze data. The simulation game that is being used for this research was developed as part of SamenMarkt. SamenMarkt is a project that had been established to investigate the supply chain of vegetables in the horticulture sector. Part of the SamenMarkt project was the development of a simulation game to examine the interactions between stakeholders in the supply chain. Human participants took part in the game in which they could buy and sell tomatoes. This resulted in different trading interactions between the players, such as submitting, receiving, winning or losing offers. In this research, the trade actions in the simulation game are investigated on their relationship with the affective states that participants experienced during the game play. This is performed by analyzing the occurrence of facial movements through the facial action coding system (FACS). The results showed significant differences for the occurrence of some action units between different trade actions or positive versus negative trade actions. These outcomes show that there are some specific action units that significantly differ in occurrence or intensity between trading actions, indicating that some of those events may evoke corresponding immediate affect. Based on the discussion, it can be argued that this trading gaming simulation does elicit affective states related to the trading process, e.g. positive affect resulting from a positive event, or negative affect emerging from a negative event. However, it requires further research to provide a more general conclusion regarding the meaning of certain action units and the relationship to the trade actions.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b1f116ea-994b-487e-b58c-e719c48545ca

2020-11-13

Student theses

master thesis

© 2020 Jessy Lee Kemmers