How Video Game Designers Peek Inside Their Players’ Lives
How Video Game Designers Peek Inside Their Players’ Lives
How Video Game Designers Peek Inside Their Players’ Lives
By Liz Fiacco
April 29, 2023
Summary
There's less reliance on happenstance that the right person will meet your game at the right time; as a game developer, I have tools to reach out and meet each player where they are.
The narrator expresses doubt that the game is so advanced, and it isn't clear how exactly the data is used, so it's hard to say if the game is adjusting itself based on heuristics, or if she's projecting her internal mental state and trauma onto the game mechanics.
Assuming the game is literally adapting to the narrator's biometric and social data, there are plenty of real-world precedents of games ingesting user data to craft a bespoke or responsive player experience.
I've even seen an experimental project developed at a game jam that connects to an EEG device, and a game could certainly tap into a commercial biometric reader like a Fitbit.
While these kinds of advanced data-mining and biometric technologies are available to today's game designers, by far the most common type of dynamic adjustment in games involves using analytics on player performance within the game itself to make small adjustments to difficulty, leveraging a variety of design techniques.
"Rubber-banding" is the practice of speeding up or slowing down computer-controlled opponents in racing games to better match the player's skill level; "Trap doors" detect if the player fails at the same part of a game over and over and start making combat a little bit easier, often in subtle ways designed to escape the player's notice.
Perhaps the most prominent example of integrating social data into games is at Nintendo, which has built a number of games that shuffle digital avatars of your friends and family, called Miis, into a variety of different settings.
Reference
Fiacco , L. (2023, April 29). How Video Game Designers Peek Inside Their Players’ Lives. SLAT. https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/personalized-video-game-design.html