Towards Effectively Adapting Games: What needs to be Conquered to Achieve Adaptation

Towards Effectively Adapting Games: What needs to be Conquered to Achieve Adaptation

Towards Effectively Adapting Games: What needs to be Conquered to Achieve Adaptation

By Phil Lopes and Maria Micaela Fonesca

Abstract

“Digital games are unique in the sense that they are oneof the few mediums that allow users to directly interactand engage with a virtual world. These worlds are often complex and filled with intertwining types of mediasuch as: audio, 3D/2D visuals and intricate narratives;which in turn react to what the player is doing in-game.This interaction however, is often hand-crafted by human designers who meticulously determine the exact parameters of how the player interacts and how the gameshould react. One of the emerging fields within the digital game research community has been on the conceptof game content adaptation, where the field consists ofthe development of methods that can adapt a game towards the preference of the player. Despite a lot of workexisting in this field, the focus often tends to be exclusively on the construction of a system that can generatea wide variety of specific virtual artifacts (ProceduralContent Generation), or the development of statistical models which provide powerful methodologies capableof profiling and classifying players (Player Modeling).This paper argues that these methods can be used forother purposes that can directly benefit the player experience, where the game would tailor the game-playto each individual or group of players. Although thisis not a relatively new idea, a lack of work and methods is still prevalent when it comes to the specificationof how this game-play can change in such a way thatit either benefits the player experience or some otherfactor, such as games for rehabilitation that go beyondentertainment. More precisely, this paper argues thatan abundant amount of research is being conducted onone part of the problem, but not the other: “How does a Digital Game Adapt?”

Reference

Lopes, P., &Fonesca, M. M. (2021). Towards effectively adapting games: What needs to be conquered to achieve adaptation. Retrieved February 15, 2022, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354890723_Towards_Effectively_Adapting_Games_What_needs_to_be_Conquered_to_Achieve_Adaptation

Keyword

Game adaptation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital games, game orchestration, procedural content generation, research