Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment of Game AI by MCTS for the game Pac-Man

Hao, Yanan; He, Suoju; Wang, Junping; Liu, Xiao; Yang, Jiajian; Huang, Wan

doi:10.1109/icnc.2010.5584761

Cited by 23 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Finally, the game environment itself can be altered when the player's performance changes: for example, if the character levels up, the enemies they encounter change and become more varied in their quantities, the character might also find specific items and locations, which might not have been accessible beforehand. These approaches are more common for role-playing games, however difficulty adaptation algorithms have also been extensively used in games like Tetris (Lora et al, 2016;Spiel et al, 2017) and Pac-man (Hao et al, 2010), where the typical adjustments affect the moving parts in the games, such as tetrominos in Tetris and ghosts in Pac-Man. Difficulty adaptation has also been explored for games with continuous gameplay, e.g.…”

Section: Adaptation In Digital Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Player experience and deceptive expectations of difficulty adaptation in digital games

Denisova

Cairns

2019

Entertainment Computing

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Increasingly, digital games are including adaptive features that adjust the level of difficulty to match the skills of individual players. The intention is to improve and prolong the player experience by allowing the player to have the feeling of challenge without it being overwhelming and leading to repeated failure and frustration. Previous work has shown that player experience is indeed improved by such adaptations but also that the player experience can be improved also by simply claiming such an adaptation is present even when it is not. It is therefore possible that claims about adaptations and the actual adaptations could interact and not lead to the intended outcomes for the players or worse disappoint players. This paper reports on two studies that were conducted to experimentally investigate the interaction between game adaptations and player information about adaptations on the player experience, specifically their sense of immersion in the game. For this, two games were developed using two different kinds of adaptations to adjust difficulty based on players' performance in the game. Participants were provided with information about game adaptations independently of whether the adaptations were present. The results suggest that players felt more immersed in the game when told that the game adapts to them, regardless of whether the adaptation was present in the game or not. This effect was observed in both games despite their different adaptations and it remained prominent even during longer gaming sessions. These findings demonstrate that players' knowledge of adaptations influences their experience independently of adaptations. In this particular context, the knowledge reinforced the experience of the adaptations. This suggests that, at least in some circumstances, developers do not need to be concerned about negative effects of telling players about in-game adaptations.

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Section: Adaptation In Digital Gamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Player experience and deceptive expectations of difficulty adaptation in digital games

Denisova

Cairns

2019

Entertainment Computing

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“…Passive DDA has been gaining popularity and has been actively researched (Alexander, Oikonomou, & Sear, 2013) (Arulraj, 2010) (Hao, He, Wang, Liu, Yang, & Huang, 2010) (Sha, et al (Bycer). As seen in Figure 1, a passive DDA mechanism is commonly implemented as a special module which works separately from main gameplay module.…”

Section: Passive Dynamic Difficulty Adjustmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The mechanism allows the difficulty level of a video game to be adjusted at run-time, thus making it easier to ensure that every player gets the right difficulty level. Currently, the most popular type of DDA is the passive one, which does not directly involve players in its execution (Alexander, Oikonomou, & Sear, 2013) (Arulraj, 2010) (Hao, He, Wang, Liu, Yang, & Huang, 2010) (Sha, et al, 2010) (Wu, Chen, He, Sun, Li, & Zhao, 2011) (Yu, et al, 2010.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Game Design Document Format For Video Games With Passive Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment

Atmaja¹,

Siahaan²,

Kuswardayan³

2016

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AbstrakPermainan video adalah perangkat lunak hiburan, sehingga kepuasan pemainnya adalah tolok ukur utama kualitasnya. Satu elemen penting dari kepuasan pemain adalah tingkat kesulitan yang tepat, yang tidak terlalu mudah maupun sukar. Dewasa ini, cara termutakhir untuk menerapkan tingkat kesulitan yang tepat adalah Pengaturan Kesulitan Dinamis (PKD), yang dapat memodifikasi tingkat kesulitan permainan pada saat run-time. Tipe PKD yang paling populer pada saat ini adalah PKD pasif. Di sisi lain, Dokumen Desain Permainan (DDP) adalah artefak penting dalam pengembangan perangkat lunak permainan video, dan belum ditemukan format DDP yang mendukung perancangan mekanisme PKD pasif. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah menemukan format DDP baru yang mendukung perancangan tersebut. Kami memodifikasi sebuah format DDP yang bersifat umum dengan menambahkan bagian-bagian baru untuk perancangan mekanisme PKD pasif. Format hasil modifikasi tersebut diuji dalam proses pengujian yang melibatkan sejumlah pengembang dan sejumlah pemain. Para pengembang mengembangkan sejumlah permainan video menggunakan format DDP yang dimodifikasi dan format yang umum. Proses pengembangan yang mereka jalani diamati dan dinilai kelancarannya. Permainan-permainan video yang dihasilkan dengan kedua format DDP dimainkan oleh para pemain untuk menguji kualitas mekanisme PKD pasifnya. Hasil pengujian oleh para pengembang menyatakan bahwa format DDP yang dimodifikasi lebih baik dari format yang umum. Hasil pengujian oleh para pemain menunjukkan keunggulan permainan-permainan video yang dihasilkan dengan format DDP yang dimodifikasi, walau keunggulan itu tidak signifikan. Berdasarkan hasil tersebut, kami menyatakan bahwa format DDP yang dimodifikasi berhasil mencapai tujuannya.Kata kunci: permainan video, rekayasa kebutuhan, Pengaturan Kesulitan Dinamis, dokumen desain permainan, pengembangan perangkat lunak. AbstractVideo game is a type of entertainment software, and therefore the satisfaction of its players is the primary mean to measure its quality. One important element of player’s satisfaction is a proper difficulty level, which is neither too easy nor too hard. The current state-of-the-art way to implement it is with Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA), which allows the difficulty level of a video game to be adjusted at run-time. Currently, the most popular type of DDA is the passive one. Meanwhile, Game Design Document (GDD) is an important artefact in the development process of a video game software, and there is still no GDD format that supports the design of passive DDA mechanism. The aim of this research was to find a new GDD format that supports the mechanism. We modified a general purpose GDD format by adding new parts for designing passive DDA mechanism. We tested the usefulness of the modified format in a testing process involving developers and players. The developers developed video games using the modified GDD format and the general purpose one. Their development processes were observed and evaluated to know if there were any difficulties. The resulting video games were played by the players to find which are better in terms of passive DDA mechanism. The result of developer testing showed that the modified format is better than the general purpose one. The result of player testing showed that the video games made with the modified format are better than their counterparts, albeit by an insignificant margin. Based on the results, we declare that the modified GDD format is successful.Keywords: Video game, requirement engineering, game design document, dynamic difficulty adjustment, software development.

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“…Much research has been done regarding DDA and while newer advancements in machine learning techniques and algorithms allow for the development of new ways for adjusting the difficulty dynamically [39,73,34,27,58,70]. The underlying reasons why DDA should be applied still remain an object of much research [4,58,39,2].…”

Section: Dynamic Difficulty Adjustmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Hao et al [27] where they also use ANNs made specifically to approach MTCS while managing to keep the performance similar to the former. As a result of the approaches mentioned before, the performance and results tend to be positive.…”

Section: Dynamic Difficulty Adjustmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Player modeling for dynamic difficulty adjustment in top down action games

Rodriguez¹

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Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment of Game AI by MCTS for the game Pac-Man

Cited by 23 publications

References 2 publications

Player experience and deceptive expectations of difficulty adaptation in digital games

Player experience and deceptive expectations of difficulty adaptation in digital games

Game Design Document Format For Video Games With Passive Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment

Player modeling for dynamic difficulty adjustment in top down action games

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