Proceedings of the SAB'06 Workshop on Adaptive Approaches for Optimizing Player Satisfaction in Computer and Physical Games

These proceedings contain the papers presented at the Workshop on Adaptive approaches for Optimizing Player Satisfaction in Computer and Physical Games held at the Ninth international conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB’06): From Animals to Animats 9 in Rome, Italy on 1 October 2006. We were motivated by the current state-of-the-art in intelligent game design using adaptive approaches. Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are mainly focused on generating human-like and intelligent character behaviors. Meanwhile there is generally little further analysis of whether these behaviors contribute to the satisfaction of the player. The implicit hypothesis motivating this research is that intelligent opponent behaviors enable the player to gain more satisfaction from the game. This hypothesis may well be true; however, since no notion of entertainment or enjoyment is explicitly defined, there is therefore little evidence that a specific character behavior generates enjoyable games. Our objective for holding this workshop was to encourage the study, development, integration, and evaluation of adaptive methodologies based on richer forms of humanmachine interaction for augmenting gameplay experiences for the player. We wanted to encourage a dialogue among researchers in AI, human-computer interaction and psychology disciplines who investigate dissimilar methodologies for improving gameplay experiences. We expected that this workshop would yield an understanding of state-ofthe- art approaches for capturing and augmenting player satisfaction in interactive systems such as computer games. Our invited speaker was Hakon Steinø, Technical Producer of IO-Interactive, who discussed applied AI research at IO-Interactive, portrayed the future trends of AI in computer game industry and debated the use of academic-oriented methodologies for augmenting player satisfaction. The sessions of presentations and discussions where classified into three themes: Adaptive Learning, Examples of Adaptive Games and Player Modeling. The Workshop Committee did a great job in providing suggestions and informative reviews for the submissions; thank you! This workshop was in part supported by the Danish National Research Council (project no: 274-05-0511). Finally, thanks to all the participants; we hope you found this to be useful!peer-reviewe

Games and Phone Numbers: Do Short Term Memory Bounds Affect Strategy Behavior?

Research in experimental and behavioral game theory has revealed a substantial and persistent degree of heterogeneity in the strategic behavior of real individuals. While the prevailing theoretical explanations of the observed heterogeneity typically invoke underlying differences in beliefs among the population of players, we argue that a further source of heterogeneity may consist in the individuals' different ability to process information, of which short term memory capacity provides a measurable proxy. Research in cognitive psychology has shown that individuals typically differ in their short term memory capacity; furthermore, short term memory capacity provides a fundamental cognitive bottleneck to our ability to process information efficiently and hence seems correlated with performance in a variety of problem solving and reasoning tasks. In this paper we conduct experiments on a set of well-known games whose solution concepts require the application of some paradigmatic forms of strategic reasoning, such as iterated dominance, reasoning about common knowledge and backward induction. We separately conduct standard short term memory tests on our subjects to detect the presence of a correlation between individuals' behavior in the games - here defined in terms of degrees of conformity to the standard game-theoretic prescriptions - and their short term memory score. Our results show the presence of a significant and positive correlation between subjects' short term memory score and conformity to standard game-theoretic prescriptions in the games, thus confirming our hypothesis. While the robustness of our conjecture awaits to be confirmed by further data gathering in more interactive experimental settings, our preliminary results suggest a promising line of inquiry on the interconnections between information processing capacity and strategic behavior