This is your brain on video games, ads discusses the role technology from EmSense Corporation is playing in the development of Frontline: Fuel of War, the upcoming first-person shooter from Kaos Studios (thanks Mike Martinez). Instead of quizzing focus groups about their feelings about the game, this EmSense technology is being used to ostensibly read their minds to gauge their emotional reaction. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Developing a first-person shooter video game that can rival the genre's top-selling hits like Call of Duty is always a long shot.

So game maker THQ tried an unusual research method last year to evaluate people's early emotional response to its in-development shooter game Frontlines. Instead of asking a test group how it liked the game, as with most market research, the company hired technology specialist EmSense to measure people's brain waves, heart rate and sweat responses while they played the military-theme game. Armed with that data, THQ took Frontlines in a whole new direction developmentally, said Bob Aniello, chief marketing officer at THQ.

"We typically rely on people to tell us what they think. Using EmSense technology, it's not what people say, but what they're thinking about it. And that's so much more accurate," Aniello said.
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THQ is looking to EmSense for more information on how people respond to its content before it hits stores. The game maker will test an early-in-development game, or "pre-alpha," by creating a minute-long CGI video that captures the essence of the game. Showing the clip to a small audience, THQ gets a read on the general response of would-be players, without them actually playing the game. In later stages of development, THQ might evaluate player responses to the game by exposing them to 20 minutes of play.