Toward Cooperative Level Generation in Multiplayer Games: A User Study in Overcooked!

Toward Cooperative Level Generation in Multiplayer Games: A User Study in Overcooked!

Toward Cooperative Level Generation in Multiplayer Games: A User Study in Overcooked!

By In-Chang Baek, Tae-Gwan Ha, Tae-Hwa Park, and Kyung-Joong Kim

Abstract

“Multiplayer contents play an essential role in extending the lifespan of the game and positively affect the player’s experience. However, previous studies on procedural content generation focused on single-player games and few for multiplayer games. Multiplayer games have different ethics and mechanics associated with competition or cooperation. Thus, content designers are concerned about this interaction. In this paper, we propose a new method for generating multiplayer levels that encourage diverse cooperation among game players. Our contributions are summarized as follows: 1) We designed four cooperation patterns usable in controllable generation literature. 2) We proposed a controllable level generator to deploy the proposed patterns in the two-player cooperative cooking game, Overcooked!. 3) We discussed effective methods for leading players’ cooperation experience. Consequently, we found that the players’ interaction is most fundamental at the multiplayer level. The results of our study will lead to diverse cooperation experiences in future multiplayer game content generation studies.”

Reference

Baek, I., Ha, T., Park, T., &; Kim, K. (2022). Toward cooperative level generation in multiplayer games: A user study in overcooked! 2022 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). doi:10.1109/cog51982.2022.9893581 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9893581

Keyword

Games, procedural content generation, genetic algorithm, cooperative, multiplayer ,research