Action Recognition for Support of Adaptive Gameplay: A Case Study of a First Person Shooter

Abstract

With games continuously and rapidly evolving to become more complex and sophisticated in their nature and implementation. There is a fundamental need to sustain and deliver a similarly advanced, realistic, and engaging experience for the player. The implementation of "emergence" within games as providing an effective means to sustain this engagement in conjunction with some form of action recognition mechanism for its support. More recently, games have made much of the "adaptive" mechanisms that tailor the player experience during the game, but much of this appears to be implemented by merely making the game harder according to the success of the player. Some go further than this by incorporating adaptive AI that change agent tactics to suit the player's style of play. Whilst these are clearly advances in the approach to providing a player-centric experience to engage the player, the basis and transferability of these approaches is open to question. Here we propose a limited flavour of "emergence" which can be used to support an adaptive game mechanism and so present players with different gameplay experiences based on their actions within the game.

Fusing Visual and Behavioral Cues for Modeling User Experience in Games

“…Artificial and computational intelligence methods have been used to generate different aspects of content with or without human interference [28], [29], [30], [31], [32]. The creation of personalized content for either the player or the designer [28], [33], [34], [14], [35] already shapes a leading research direction within procedural content generation (PCG). The first step towards creating personalized content is to effectively model the relationship between player experience and content.…”

Design metaphors for procedural content generation in games

“…Kazmi and Palmer describe a system, embodying both a PLAYER EXPERT and a DESIGNER, premised on analysing and interpreting player actions in terms of player skill and style [16]. In the context of a first-person shooter, their system matches a player to a playing style (novice or advanced), and adapts several aspects of the game and its mechanics accordingly.…”

Towards player-driven procedural content generation

“…A recent overview of recently used techniques can be found in [19,24]. An interesting direction within the automatic content generation is the creation of personalized content [5,18,12]. Optimization of game aspects based on empirically derived models has mostly been focused on the impact of non player character NPC behavior and the adjustment of NPC behavioral parameters for maximizing satisfaction in games [1,8].…”