THE HEART OF GAMING

©2019 audEERING GmbH    Soroosh Mashal         21.08.2019

Gamescom is called the heart of gaming for a reason. You can feel the flow of passion in those halls even outside of Cologne Exhibition Center. As last year, audEERING was also there to share ideas and experience this ever vibrant community. Whether it was meeting with politicians, presenting products, partying with passionate gamers, or press publicity, we all were united in our commitment to bringing more fun to this world.

Something was though different this year. We held the award ceremony of the premier audEERING Game Challenge (GaCha 2019). This international challenge called upon young talents to become pioneers in joining Emotion AI and Video Game Industry. In a 3 months period, 29 teams from all over the world accepted the call and used AI technology to realize their ideas. Their mission: Create something novel and unique! And they delivered: they developed games which are changed by our emotions – our deepest way of communication.

The first winner, Amirreza Moeini-Yegane, brought “Destiny” into life. A third person shooter (TPS) game in which three guardians are supposed to protect the nexus. But you may ask yourself, what makes this game unique? The answer is every emotional expression you make while you play.

Your happiness feels up your mass healing which you can use to heal all of your turrets at once, your sadness feels up your Curse of Alien which rains havoc as an Area of Effect (AoE) damage on all enemies, and your Urgency feels up your artillery which you can use to destroy a group of enemies.

Emotional interaction with virtual characters and environments will be baseline in a decade from now. Which games will be the first ones to shape the way our future generations interact with games and computers? GaCha Challenge 2020 is already in plan. We’ll let you know how we’ll move from there!