Sound Symbolic Words as a Game Controller

We developed a game system driven by sound symbolic words that given by a user. While most of other voice-interactive games released in the past focused on making a communication between a player and in-game characters by understanding the meaning of speech, our game system interprets sounds of voice into operable commands. The player's character can move around in a 2D side-scrolling platform game runs on Unity, and its action is controlled by the degree of dynamically and elasticity expressed in the sound symbolic words given by the user. We conducted experiments on 18 subjects to evaluate the difference in user experience between the operation with a conventional game controller and proposed method. As the result of an analysis on questionnaires, it was found that proposed method can provide new experiences to users and can make the game more enjoyable though the difficulty of the game increases by the unfamiliar controlling method.