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Abstract
Understanding and modelling player experience helps us to design games that satisfy various player's needs. Current player models focus on behaviour, cognition and emotion, but player motive profiles have not been fully studied. The focus of this thesis is on three types of motivation profiles: achievement, affiliation and power. Existing motivation measurements include subjective methods and objective methods. However, it is the lack of an automatic, objective measurement method that motivates the work in this thesis. Electroencephalography measures brain signals during gameplay without interrupting players. Therefore, electroencephalographic signals can be regarded as a promising way to measure player motivation profiles.
In this thesis, we aim to develop methodologies to assess achievement, affiliation and power motivation of computer game players using electroencephalographic signals during game play. First, we designed a mini-game for identifying achievement, affiliation and power motivation in a strategic decision-making scenario. Then a human experiment was conducted to collect three kinds of data: player behaviour, electroencephalographic signals and psychological test data. Based on three subject labelling schemes using the psychological test output, we examined the effectiveness of using player behaviour and electroencephalographic signals to classify player motivation in the proposed mini-game.
Results showed that electroencephalography-based measurement revealed motivation better than the behaviour-based measurement. According to the proposed mini-game, money and satisfaction features of non-player characters related to risk-taking and social behaviour respectively. The behaviour of non-player characters such as random and tit for tat strategies were good choices for evoking human social attitude. Always defect, random and tit for tat were good choices for evoking human risk-taking attitudes. However, always cooperate was the least useful strategy for reflecting social and risk-taking attitudes. Also, the findings identified the most significant electroencephalographic features for assessing achievement, affiliation and power motivation in the proposed mini-game.