Designing and Testing Affective Supports in an Educational Game

Five types of affective supports were designed to induce an appropriate emotional regulation strategy in players of an educational video game. These supports were based on the emotional regulation strategies of situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation. A series of qualitative studies was designed to answer usability and efficacy questions on the incorporation of these affective supports into the game Physics Playground. Ultimately two of the five support types were removed and the implementation of two others were changed to between game levels rather than in the middle of gameplay. The results also offered insight into the relationship between player ability and when support was preferred.