Arcade Game 2024.11

BOX SEAT is a ride-type arcade game that treats the audience’s facial expressions as input. Set in the box seats found in public transportation and restaurants, the audience progresses through scenes by completing “facial expression training sessions” with a digital human who appears on the screen. Drawing on the basic emotions proposed by facial-expression researcher Paul Ekman, the work uses four expressions—happiness, surprise, anger, and sadness—as input commands, making it, in effect, a “face game.”

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The work uses OpenFace for facial recognition, detecting the audience’s facial movements in real time. However, because OpenFace is primarily trained on Western facial samples, there can be moments when Asian expressions do not align with the system’s classification. As technology advances, convenience can come at the cost of a new kind of inequality: a spectrum of “easy to recognize / hard to recognize,” through which racial and cultural differences re-emerge as disparity. Faces outside the Western norm are not recognized as “faces” by the machine’s eye with sufficient resolution—and that discomfort seeps into the game’s progression itself.

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Each session begins with a tutorial, where the audience forms the prompted expression and confirms that their input is being recognized. The experience then moves through a sequence of tasks: responding with an expression to images like those used in psychology experiments; imitating the facial expressions of film actors; recreating expressions described in text; and completing mini-games that occur between sessions. By switching expressions and clearing each task, the audience transitions to the next scene.

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A camera installed next to the monitor captures the audience, and chroma-key compositing generates an image that makes it appear as if they are facing the digital human. To encourage shifts in facial expression, not only the on-screen visuals but also location changes, video game-like effects, lighting, sound, and seat vibrations are synchronized—transforming the entire enclosure into a “training ground.”

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In urban life, where the machine’s eye arbitrarily quantifies our physical and mental states, exaggerating and training facial expressions can become a form of fitness for the near future—or a way of conditioning the body to deceive the machine’s eye. A body that adapts to technology, and a body recalculated from the fact of not being recognized—BOX SEAT lets the audience experience that mismatch and resistance as a game.

観客の表情を入力として扱うライド型アーケードゲーム。交通機関や飲食店にあるボックスシートを舞台に、 観客は画面内で対峙するデジタルヒューマンと表情を鍛えるセッションをこなしていくことでシーンを展開する。 表情研究者であるポール・エクマンが提唱した基本感情のうち「幸福」「驚き」「怒り」「悲しみ」の表情を入力コマンドとして扱う、いわば「顔ゲー」である。心身の状態が無作為に数値化されてしまう都市生活において、過剰に表情を作って鍛えることは来るべき未来に向けたフィットネスとなるだろう。テクノロジーにフィットした身体づくりである。

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Construction Design: Nobuhiko Kawahara
Sound Design: Chiku Komiya
Technical Support: Takuro Yamakawa, Shinya Matsuyama
Install Support: Hiroki Akiyama
Support: CG-ARTS, ATAMI ART GRANT, Project to Support Emerging Media Arts Creators