Content Agnostic Game Engineering: Impact of Stealth Assessment and Content Order on Player Engagement

Content Agnostic Game Engineering (CAGE) architecture utilizes content agnostic mechanics to create educational games that can teach multiple contents. However, the player engagement goes down when second content is played using the same game mechanics. A content agnostic stealth assessment can aid a CAGE game in sustaining the engagement level of its players. A potentially generalizable method for this was tested using Chem-o-crypt, a CAGE game that can teach chemistry and cryptography contents. The game automatically detects frustration, flow, and boredom using the Affdex SDK from Affectiva. A randomized controlled experiment incorporating real-time game adaptation revealed that using stealth assessment can help sustain engagement in a CAGE game when playing multiple contents.