Introduction

MoodSwings is a collaborative game that incorporates your subjective judgements of the emotional content of music.

MoodSwings currently works best with the Firefox browser. We are working to solve difficulties with Safari and Internet Explorer, but they are not stable at this time.

At the start of the game, you are partnered with another player anonymously across the internet. The goal of the game is for you and your co-player to agree on the mood of several short music clips along two dimensions:

• valence: positive vs. negative emotions (top-bottom)
• arousal: high- vs. low-intensity (left-right)

You make your ratings by moving your cursor (yellow) on the gameboard. You will see your partner's cursor (red) intermittently, every few seconds. The more overlap between your cursors, the more points you will score. The cursors become smaller over time as the clip plays, requiring the players to agree on their ratings more precisely to score points.

WARNING: Some songs in the MoodSwings music database contain explicit lyrics. We hope to offer an option to exlude these tracks in the near future.

Description of Gameplay

• Each MoodSwings match consists of 5 rounds, each with a different song clip. Each round will last 30 seconds.
• Once you are paired with a partner, the game will begin once the countdown reaches zero. The game board will be inactive until the round begins.
• Once the round begins, you will see your cursor. As you listen to the clip, move your cursor to the location that best describes the current mood of the song.
• If the mood of the song changes, you should move your cursor to the location corresponding to the new mood.
• You will have a 5 seconds to move it before you see your partner's location. Afterwards, you will see your partner's location every 3 seconds.
• The cursor size will decrease every second during the round.
• At the end of each round, you'll see your score for the round and your total points for the match thus far (below left).
• At the end of each match, you'll learn the performing artist and title for each clip, as well as the points for each round and the total score for the match (below right).

Scoring

• Your primary score is based upon the amount of overlap between your cursor and that of your partner.
• This score is accumulated whenever your partner is visible. The points accumulated will be displayed on top of your partner's cursor (below left).
• You can also accumulate bonus points by "convincing" your partner to agree with your mood assessment:
  • You are eligible to accumulate bonus points after you remain stationary for 1 second. This is indicated by a yellow square around your cursor (below middle).
  • If a partner moves towards your location so that your cursors overlap, you will gain 5 bonus points. This will be indicated by your cursor changing to green (below right).
  • You can accumulate bonus points even when your partner is not visible.
  • You only gain bonus points when you remain stationary.

About the music

The music for MoodSwings is drawn from a collection of over 7000 popular music tracks from more than 350 performing artists. As mentioned previously, some of the songs contain explicit lyrics. Additionally, some of the clips may not include music at all because of applause from live recordings and other unusual tracks from a few albums.

Underneath the main gameboard, you will see the following options:

Please click on the appropriate option if you encounter:

• A clip that does not contain music (so that we can filter these tracks out in the future)
• Explicit lyrics (this will help us create a version of the game that exludes these songs)
• Any other problem with your current round (to help us track down and fix bugs in the code)

Now it's time for you to give it a try!

Click here to play MoodSwings!