Investigating the effect of smartphone games on emotions: An approach to Kansei Engineering System

Smartphones provide countless opportunities for users to get rid of negative emotional states and have more enjoyable experiences by interacting with others and digital content. Today game designers are looking for ways to improve the user experience to enhance players' experience by improving their connections with a game. On the other hand, modern education has taken a new approach through the conceptual combination of video games. Depending on several factors, players can experience emotions such as joy, anxiety, satisfaction, fear, or disappointment, while playing. In fact, two important questions that game designers need to ask themselves are why people play games and what motivates them to do so. It can be said that the main reason for the game for people is that "video games are now considered a human experience."In different style games, the player individually is informed about affairs, events, and processes that force them to take actions such as forecasting, planning, vital decisions, and finally sensitive management if the answers are accurate, correct, and intelligent Researchers such as have shown that such games have a significant effect on selective attention, working memory, spatial visualization, reaction time and even processing speed. For all the reasons mentioned, in this study, an attempt has been made to examine the type of interest of people in different styles of games, in order to be able to help game developers.Kansei Engineering System Kansei is a Japanese word that comes from the heart of Japanese culture and is a kind of psychological feeling or product imagination that has no direct equivalent in the vocabulary of other languages. The term is actually derived from Japanese culture, which is closely related to the characteristics of this culture. The concept of kanji is very much related to the concept of personal feelings. In this research, an attempt is made to help game developers to design games that are of interest to users by using the Kansei engineering system. Researcher made questionnaire In this research, the Kansei engineering system was used to evaluate products. At first, different styles of mobile games were studied. According to a study on a variety of smartphone games, the results obtained on the styles of these game categories are action, words, puzzle, simulation, driving, hobby, strategy, sports, and music. Then, based on the opinions of activities in the field of designing games, one or two games were selected from each group. The semantic differentiation method (5 scales) was used to prepare the questionnaire. For this purpose, first, the words and vocabulary related to the scope of the games were collected, out of about 70 words, 15 words "boredom, pleasure, excitement, cheerfulness, fun, fear, stress, addiction, violence, empowerment, despair, futility, Peace, challenge and usefulness" were selected. This study was conducted on five groups of 11 to 15 years, 16 to 19 years, 20 to 25 years, 26 to 35 years, and 36 years and above. Using a simple non-probability sampling method, 32, 31, 31, 25, and 24 people answered the questionnaire for each age group, respectively. 16 games were included in the online questionnaire along with Kansei words also, at the beginning of each game, users were asked to fill in the options for that game if they were familiar with it. After analyzing the results of the questionnaire, the correlation coefficient was used for clustering Kansei words. Words that were close in correlation coefficient were numerically related to each other, regardless of the semantic relationship.

The score of each Kansei word in different games for each age group was analyzed. Kansei's words for the game of call of duty had the highest score among all the games in all groups. In the age group of 26 to 35 years, the cooking fever score was also at the level of the call of duty game. In the age group of 11 to 15 years, Amirza game had the lowest score and most words in this game had a score of less than 2. In the age group of 16 to 19 years and 20 to 25 years, Talking Angela had the lowest score and most of the words in this game had scored less than 2 and 2.5, respectively. In the age group of 26 to 35 years and 36 years and above, cooking fever had the lowest score, and most words in this game had scored less than 3 and 2.5, respectively.The highest score in each cluster. In the age group of 11 to 15 years, the game of sudoku was the most frequent among all clusters. In the age groups of 16 to 19 years, 20 to 25 years, and 36 years and above, the game Call of duty was the most frequent among all clusters and in the age groups of 26 to 35 years, Angela's game was the most frequent among all clusters. Finally, in the age group of 36 years and above, in addition to Call of Duty, clash royale and street racing games were also more frequent among the clusters.

In this study, we tried to identify users' feelings towards different game styles by the Kansei engineering system and extract the features considered by different age groups and use them in designing games. In all groups, the word entertainment had the highest score and the word fear, violence, and despair had the lowest score. Call of duty was also very popular among all age groups due to factors such as graphics, social interactions, sound effects, narrative structure, 3D images, and realism. It can be concluded that in designing any style of play and for any age, creating a sense of the real world for individuals will be the key to success. Also, paying attention to the mental and emotional states of people, according to their age, will be very effective in designing the game. In addition, it is recommended that future studies can be conducted on various gaming platforms (eg PCs, tablets, etc.) besides examining different game designs, neurologically.