In the domain of computer games, research into the interaction between player and game has centred on 'enjoyment', often drawing in particular on optimal experience research and Csikszentmihalyi's 'Flow theory'. Flow is a well-established construct for examining experience in any setting and its application to game-play is intuitive. Nevertheless, it's not immediately obvious how to translate between the flow construct and an operative description of game-play. Previous research has attempted this translation through analogy. In this article we propose a practical, integrated approach for analysis of the mechanics and aesthetics of game-play, which helps develop deeper insights into the capacity for flow within games. The relationship between player and game, characterized by learning and enjoyment, is central to our analysis. We begin by framing that relationship within Cowley's user-system-experience (USE) model, and expand this into an information systems framework, which enables a practical mapping of flow onto game-play. We believe this approach enhances our understanding of a player's interaction with a game and provides useful insights for games' researchers seeking to devise mechanisms to adapt game-play to individual players.

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Toward an understanding of flow in video games

A meta-analysis of serious digital games for healthy lifestyle promotion.

In most challenging data analysis applications, data evolve over time and must be analyzed in near real time. Patterns and relations in such data often evolve over time, thus, models built for analyzing such data quickly become obsolete over time. In machine learning and data mining this phenomenon is referred to as concept drift. The objective is to deploy models that would diagnose themselves and adapt to changing data over time. This chapter provides an application oriented view towards concept drift research, with a focus on supervised learning tasks. First we overview and categorize application tasks for which the problem of concept drift is particularly relevant. Then we construct a reference framework for positioning application tasks within a spectrum of problems related to concept drift. Finally, we discuss some promising research directions from the application perspective, and present recommendations for application driven concept drift research and development.

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An Overview of Concept Drift Applications

In recent years, the fields of Interactive Storytelling and Player Modelling have independently enjoyed increased interest in both academia and the computer games industry. The combination of these technologies, however, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present PaSSAGE (Player-Specific Stories via Automatically Generated Events), an interactive storytelling system that uses player modelling to automatically learn a model of the player's preferred style of play, and then uses that model to dynamically select the content of an interactive story. Results from a user study evaluating the entertainment value of adaptive stories created by our system as well as two fixed, pre-authored stories indicate that automatically adapting a story based on learned player preferences can increase the enjoyment of playing a computer role-playing game for certain types of players.

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Interactive storytelling: a player modelling approach

In computer games and simulations, content is often rather static and rigid. As a result, its prescripted nature can lead to predictable and impersonal gameplay, while alienating unconventional players. Adaptivity in games has therefore been recently proposed to overcome these shortcomings and make games more challenging and appealing. In this paper, we survey present research on game adaptivity, identifying, and discussing the main challenges, and pointing out some of the most promising directions ahead. We first survey the purposes of adaptivity, as the principles that could steer an adaptation and generation engine. From this perspective, we proceed to thoroughly discuss adaptivity's targets and methods. Current advances and successes in this emerging field point to many yet unexplored research opportunities. Among them, we discuss the use of gameplay expectations, learning preferences, and assessment data in the integrated adaptation of game worlds, scenarios, and quests. We conclude that, among other methods, procedural content generation and semantic modeling can powerfully combine to create offline customized content and online adjustments to game worlds, scenarios, and quests. These and other promising methods, deserving ample research efforts, can therefore, be expected to significantly contribute towards making games and simulations even more unpredictable, effective, and fun.

https://graphics.tudelft.nl/~rafa/myPapers/bidarra.TCIAIG.2011a.pdf

Adaptivity Challenges in Games and Simulations: A Survey

We describe an approach to player-centred game design through adaptive game technologies [9]. The work presented is the result of on-going collaborative research between Media and Computing groups at the University of Ulster, and so we begin with a review of related literature from both areas before presenting our new ideas. In particular we focus on three areas of related research: understanding players, modelling players, and adaptive game technology. We argue that player modelling and adaptive technologies may be used alongside existing approaches to facilitate improved player-centred game design in order to provide a more appropriate level of challenge, smooth the learning curve, and enhance the gameplay experience for individual players regardless of gender, age and experience. However, adaptive game behaviour is a controversial topic within game research and development and so while we outline the potential of such technologies, we also address the most significant concerns.

J Kuecklich

Papers

Player-Centred Game Design: Player Modelling and Adaptive Digital Games