5. Discussion

We conducted an impression evaluation of the Brainio Bros 300 cooperative game and its usefulness. First, the results of the SD method showed that the players evaluated the game as "full," "cooperative," "enjoyable," "happy," "cute," "friendly," "lively," "satisfying," and "new," with "cooperative" evaluated particularly highly. On the five-point scale, the game was evaluated highly in terms of both the players' average values and the combined percentages of "strongly agree" and "agree" for the questions of "Interesting," "Communicating with a child," "Game design," and "Would recommend," with "Would recommend" showing a particularly strong correlation. Finally, the opinion that the cooperative aspect of play was interesting was particularly widely expressed in the free responses.

method for people who cannot control their line of sight [30]. It is thus important to work carefully, given the potential impacts of participants'state of mind and

A Cooperative Game Using the P300 EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interface

In this BCI-based game research, we developed a real-time game, Brainio Bros 300, a cooperative game using a P300 BCI to facilitate two users (a player, who controls the character in the game and does not wear an EEG cap, and a supporter, who uses his or her brain activity to communicate) working together to achieve one goal. We evaluated participants' impressions of the game and its usefulness and

In the future, we would like to use noninvasive measurement to investigate

This research was a first place winner, IEEE Brain Winner, and BR41N.IO SfN Winner at the IEEE SMC2018 BCI Hackathon. On receipt of these awards, we would like to express our gratitude to g.tec and to all the organizers, as well as all the

, Thomas James Tiam-Lee<sup>1</sup>

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

,

, Shogo Hirai<sup>1</sup>

more deeply the brain mechanism during a cooperative video game.

attention to the problem.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.84621

Acknowledgements

Author details

and Teruto Endo<sup>5</sup>

Kaoru Sumi<sup>1</sup>

189

considered the viability of the P300 BCI interface.

students, who assisted with our experiment.

\*, Keigo Yabuki<sup>1</sup>

2 Osaka University, Osaka, Japan

Abdelkader Nasreddine Belkacem2,3, Quentin Ferre4

1 Future University Hakodate, Hakodate, Japan

3 United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, UAE

5 Tohoku Institute of Technology, Sendai, Japan

provided the original work is properly cited.

4 Universite Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee, Paris, France

\*Address all correspondence to: kaoru.sumi@acm.org

6. Conclusion

One of the biggest advantages of Brainio Bros 300 is the capability for the player, who does not have to wear an EEG cap, to play together with the supporter, who does wear an EEG cap. We believe that playing cooperative games using a P300 BCI could be of significant benefit to people with major disabilities such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), enabling them to play with able-bodied children, family members, and friends, thus deepening connections and communication.

The use of a P300 BCI is an easy-to-measure, noninvasive method. It can also be controlled with a high degree of accuracy without the need for detailed user training in advance. Training the P300 BCI command categories does not take a great deal of time. Most patients, including almost all able-bodied people and even people with severe paralysis, can use a P300 BCI. It also offers a goal-oriented control signal that is particularly suited to situations that do not require a continuous control signal.

On the other hand, one of the game's limitations is as follows. The P300 BCI is one of the fastest of the currently usable BCIs, but it is still very slow compared to normal input devices such as mice and game controllers. In the current Brainio Bros 300 system, the player must wait for the colors to flash before having the supporter select a color.

With the development of a decoding algorithm that could detect the P300 brain wave to a high degree of accuracy after only one attempt, a command could be sent to the game every second. The results could then be adjusted according to feedback following categorization. For example, in the event of a mistaken command, the response time could be minimized by testing the supporter again. This should also allow the result to be checked once per second. Although Brainio Bros P300 is a game in which players and supporters cooperate, it takes time for a supporter to erase blocks by using P300 control as compared to standard games. Moreover, as it is a game in which two people cooperate, it differs from a competitive game based on speed. For this reason, a player and a supporter must play together and possibly become friends.

We believe that, in the future, if it is possible to reduce the number of flashes while maintaining the current level of accuracy and to increase the number of commands (controllable dimensions), this type of game would be usable in the real world and present an extremely promising interface.

Some problems with using a P300 BCI are that real-time P300 detection can sometimes be inaccurate, as it is easily affected by a number of human sensory phenomena such as attentional blinking, repetition blindness, and change blindness [24–28]. It is also possible for motivation to impact BCI performance [29], causing the EEG signal pattern to change according to the attention level, fatigue, state of mind, learning, and unsteadiness [1]. A P300 BCI might also not be an effective

method for people who cannot control their line of sight [30]. It is thus important to work carefully, given the potential impacts of participants'state of mind and attention to the problem.
