Figure 1: Scatter plots depicting the relation of pass rate (a measure of level difficulty) and churn rate over 168 game levels of Angry Birds Dream Blast, in both real player data and our simulations. Here, churn is defined as not playing for 7 days. The colors denote level numbers. The baseline simulation model predicts pass rate and churn directly from AI gameplay. Our proposed extended model augments this with a simulation of how the player population evolves over the levels.

This paper presents a novel approach to automated playtesting for the prediction of human player behavior and experience. We have previously demonstrated that Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) game-playing agents can predict both game difficulty and player engagement, operationalized as average pass and churn rates. We improve this approach by enhancing DRL with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). We also motivate an enhanced selection strategy for predictor features, based on the observation that an AI agent's best-case performance can yield stronger correlations with human data than the agent's average performance. Both additions consistently improve the prediction accuracy, and the DRL-enhanced MCTS outperforms both DRL and vanilla MCTS in the hardest levels. We conclude that player modelling via automated playtesting can benefit from combining DRL and MCTS. Moreover, it can be worthwhile to investigate a subset of repeated best AI agent runs, if AI gameplay does not yield good predictions on average.