Evolving personas for player decision modeling

This paper explores how evolved game playing agents can be used to represent a priori defined archetypical ways of playing a test-bed game, as procedural personas. The end goal of such procedural personas is substituting players when authoring game content manually, procedurally, or both (in a mixed-initiative setting). Building on previous work, we compare the performance of newly evolved agents to agents trained via Q-learning as well as a number of baseline agents. Comparisons are performed on the grounds of game playing ability, generalizability, and conformity among agents. Finally, all agents’ decision making styles are matched to the decision making styles of human players in order to investigate whether the different methods can yield agents who mimic or differ from human decision making in similar ways. The experiments performed in this paper conclude that agents developed from a priori defined objectives can express human decision making styles and that they are more generalizable and versatile than Q-learning and hand-crafted agents.peer-reviewe

MiniDungeons 2 : an experimental game for capturing and modeling player decisions

This paper describes MiniDungeons 2 (MD2): a turn-based rogue-like game developed to support research in capturing and modeling player decision making processes through procedural personas and using such models as critics for procedural content generation. MD2 intends to provide a full-circle framework for collecting, modeling, simulating, and producing content for player decision making styles. The fully instrumented and telemetric game will soon be made available to the public to be played on smart-phones for the purpose of collecting as many play traces, representing as many different decision making styles, as possible.peer-reviewe

The Personalization Paradox: the Conflict between Accurate User Models and Personalized Adaptive Systems

Personalized adaptation technology has been adopted in a wide range of digital applications such as health, training and education, e-commerce and entertainment. Personalization systems typically build a user model, aiming to characterize the user at hand, and then use this model to personalize the interaction. Personalization and user modeling, however, are often intrinsically at odds with each other (a fact some times referred to as the personalization paradox). In this paper, we take a closer look at this personalization paradox, and identify two ways in which it might manifest: feedback loops and moving targets. To illustrate these issues, we report results in the domain of personalized exergames (videogames for physical exercise), and describe our early steps to address some of the issues arisen by the personalization paradox.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2101.1002

Personas versus clones for player decision modelling

The current paper investigates how to model human play styles. Building on decision and persona theory we evolve game playing agents representing human decision making styles. Two methods are developed, applied, and compared: procedural personas, based on utilities designed with expert knowledge, and clones, trained to reproduce play traces. Additionally, two metrics for comparing agent and human decision making styles are proposed and compared. Results indicate that personas evolved from designer intuitions can capture human decision making styles equally well as clones evolved from human play traces.peer-reviewe

Two-step constructive approaches for dungeon generation

This paper presents a two-step generative approach for creating dungeons in the rogue-like puzzle game MiniDungeons 2. Generation is split into two steps, initially producing the architectural layout of the level as its walls and floor tiles, and then furnishing it with game objects representing the player's start and goal position, challenges and rewards. Three layout creators and three furnishers are introduced in this paper, which can be combined in different ways in the two-step generative process for producing diverse dungeons levels. Layout creators generate the floors and walls of a level, while furnishers populate it with monsters, traps, and treasures. We test the generated levels on several expressivity measures, and in simulations with procedural persona agents.peer-reviewe