We present the Platformer Experience Dataset (PED) — the first open-access game experience corpus — that contains multiple modalities of user data of Super Mario Bros players. The open-access database aims to be used for player experience capture through context based (i.e. game content), behavioral and visual recordings of platform game players. In addition, the database contains demographical data of the players and self-reported annotations of experience in two forms: ratings and ranks. PED opens up the way to desktop and console games that use video from web cameras and visual sensors and offer possibilities for holistic player experience modeling approaches that can, in turn, yield richer game personalization.

The dataset is made publicly available here and we encourage researchers to use it for testing their own player experience detectors.
The dataset is presented in the following paper (please cite our work if you use the dataset for your research):

• K. Karpouzis, G. Yannakakis, N Shaker, S. Asteriadis. The Platformer Experience Dataset, Sixth Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII) Conference, Xi’an, China, 21-24 September, 2015.

Further Reading

• Noor Shaker, Stylianos Asteriadis, Georgios Yannakakis and Kostas Karpouzis. Fusing Visual and Behavioral Cues for Modeling User Experience in Games, IEEE Transactions on System Man and Cybernetics, Special Issue on Modern Control for Computer Games, 2012.
• Stylianos Asteriadis, Kostas Karpouzis, Noor Shaker and Georgios Yannakakis. Towards Detecting Clusters of Players using Visual and Game-play Behavioral Cues,  in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES12), Genoa, Italy, 2012.
• Stylianos Asteriadis, Kostas Karpouzis, Noor Shaker and Georgios Yannakakis. Does your profile say it all? Using demographics to predict expressive head movement during gameplay,  in 20th conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP 2012), Workshop on TV and multimedia personalization, Montreal, Canada, 2012. 
• Stylianos Asteriadis, Noor Shaker, Kostas Karpouzis and Georgios Yannakakis. Towards Player’s Affective and Behavioral Visual Cues as drives to Game Adaptation,  LREC Workshop on Multimodal Corpora for Machine Learning, Istanbul, May, 2012. 
• Noor Shaker, Stylianos Asteriadis, Georgios Yannakakis and Kostas Karpouzis. A Game-based Corpus for Analysing the Interplay between Game Context and Player Experience, in Proceedings of the 2011 Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Conference (ACII 2011), 2011. 

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the 58 participants in this study for volunteering to take part in this experiment and accepted their data to be publicly available. This dataset was collected by Noor Shaker (Aalborg University) and Stylianos Asteriadis (Maastricht University)

Finally, we’d like to thank our funding body, the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7) under grant agreement no. 258453 (SIREN Project).