Architecture for affective social games

Abstract

The importance of affect in delivering engaging experiences in entertainment and education is well recognized. We introduce the Koko architecture, which describes a service-oriented middleware that reduces the burden of incorporating affect into games and other entertainment applications. Koko provides a representation for affect, thereby enabling developers to concentrate on the functional and creative aspects of their applications. The Koko architecture makes three key contributions: (1) improving developer productivity by creating a reusable and extensible environment; (2) yielding an enhanced user experience by enabling independently developed applications to collaborate and provide a more coherent user experience than currently possible; (3) enabling affective communication in multiplayer and social games. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.