Evolving personalized content for Super Mario Bros using grammatical evolution

Adapting game content to a particular player's needs and expertise constitutes an important aspect in game design. Most research in this direction has focused on adapting game difficultyto keep the player engaged in the game. Dynamic difficulty adjustment, however, focuses on one aspect of the gameplay experience by adjusting the content to increase ordecrease perceived challenge. In this paper, we introduce a method for automatic level generation for the platform game Super Mario Bros using grammatical evolution. The grammatical evolution-based level generator is used to generate player-adapted content by employing an adaptation mechanism as a fitness function in grammatical evolution to optimizethe player experience of three emotional states: engagement, frustration and challenge. The fitness functions used are models of player experience constructed in our previous work from crowd-sourced gameplay data collected from over 1500 game sessions.peer-reviewe

Evolving levels for Super Mario Bros using grammatical evolution

This paper presents the use of design grammars to evolve playable 2D platform levels through grammatical evolution (GE). Representing levels using design grammars allows simple encoding of important level design constraints, and allows remarkably compact descriptions of large spaces of levels. The expressive range of the GE-based level generator is analyzed and quantitatively compared to other feature-based and the original level generators by means of aesthetic and similarity based measures. The analysis reveals strengths and shortcomings of each generator and provides a general framework for comparing content generated by different generators. The approach presented can be used as an assistive tool by game designers to compare and analyze generators' capabilities within the same game genre.peer-reviewe

The experience-driven perspective

Ultimately, content is generated for the player. But so far, our algorithms have not taken specific players into account. Creating computational models of a player’s behaviour, preferences, or skills is called player modelling. With a model of the player, we can create algorithms that create content specifically tailored to that player. The experience-driven perspective on procedural content generation provides a framework for content generation based on player modelling; one of the most important ways of doing this is to use a player model in the evaluation function for search-based PCG. This chapter discusses different ways of collecting and encoding data about the player, primarily player experience, and ways of modelling this data. It also gives examples of different ways in which such models can be used.peer-reviewe