User modelling for adaptive training in high performance driving

User model creation is a fundamental component for the development of intelligent personalised systems. This thesis proposes an adaptive user modelling framework that uses a combination of unobtrusive task-related and physiological data with the aim of identifying strengths and weaknesses in user performance in the defined task. The research is focused on utilising the framework to provide personalised content adaptation in car racing games. Our system adopts concepts from the Trace Theory (TT) framework, and uses machine learning techniques to extract specific features from the user and the game. These metrics are then transformed and evaluated into higher level abstractions such as experience, exploration and physiological attention by utilising the educational theoretical frameworks of Flow and Zone Theory. The end result is to provide new game paths utilising the user’s model. We demonstrate that this procedural generation of user-tailored content drives the self-motivating behaviour of players to immerse and engage themselves in the game’s virtual world. Collection of data and feedback from multiple users (52) allowed us to associate the model’s outcomes to the user responses, as well as device multiple trial scenarios to verify their training and engagement. We have also evaluated the algorithms for the generation of new tracks for their suitability on the skill’s profile of 41 of our subjects and race track diversity among the evolved paths. We have also designed a method for predicting the states of the user-controlled system by combining information from both sources – vehicle and user – via Gaussian Processes (GPs). In the context of high speed car racing we showed that the forthcoming position and speed of the car can be predicted with high accuracy by our trained user models. This opens up future possibilities of generating better personalised tracks for individuals or even real-time share-control of the car to optimally assist the users in dangerous situations.Open Acces

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

Search-based procedural content generation

Recently, a small number of papers have appeared in which the authors implement stochastic search algorithms, such as evolutionary computation, to generate game content, such as levels, rules and weapons. We propose a taxonomy of such approaches, centring on what sort of content is generated, how the content is represented, and how the quality of the content is evaluated. The relation between search-based and other types of procedural content generation is described, as are some of the main research challenges in this new field. The paper ends with some successful examples of this approach.peer-reviewe

Towards automatic personalised content creation for racing games

Evolutionary algorithms are commonly used to create high-performing strategies or agents for computer games. In this paper, we instead choose to evolve the racing tracks in a car racing game. An evolvable track representation is devised, and a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm maximises the entertainment value of the track relative to a particular human player. This requires a way to create accurate models of players' driving styles, as well as a tentative definition of when a racing track is fun, both of which are provided. We believe this approach opens up interesting new research questions and is potentially applicable to commercial racing games

Being Jacques Villeneuve: Formula One, 'Agency' and the Fan

DVD disc of supplementary material available with the print copy of this thesis, held at the University of Waikato Library.In this thesis, I analyse my fandom for the Formula One driver, Jacques Villeneuve. Despite its rampant commercialism, innovative mediation, prestige and popular status within global sport, Formula One is surprisingly an under-researched topic in academia. Moreover, 'intense' fandom has often been stigmatised; at worst associating such individuals with pathological and obsessive behaviours or refuting their affections as merely symptomatic of the socio-economic forces that transform fans into duped consumers. This thesis argues against such simplistic disqualifications and reconceptualises fandom in light of how the structure/agency binary has itself been reconceptualised within media and cultural studies. Rather than privileging either the determining social, mediated and commercial structures, or championing the 'active agential' capacities of social individuals, Grossberg's notions of 'affect' and 'structured mobility' are drawn upon to underpin a more flexible explanation of contemporary fandom. In particular, affect offers theoretical purchase for how fans form attachments with selective media objects and why these come to 'matter' for specific individuals. Furthermore, by marrying affect with 'structured mobility', affective investments are recognised for their capacity to 'anchor' individuals in specific and concrete spatial/temporal 'moments' of social reality as they navigate both the mediated apparatus of the sport and the structured social, cultural and economic terrain that shapes their mediated fandom. Such insights are developed through a 'funnelling' approach in this thesis which moves from an examination of collective Formula One fandom to my own, exploring the affective traces of a friction that Villeneuve's maverick status provided within the broader machinery of the sport and to which this fan has responded

Masculinities, affect and the (re)place(ment) of stardom in Formula One fan leisure practices

Writing from an autoethnographic perspective, this article explores male leisure practices via the mediated relationships fans enter into with stars. More specifically, my own fandom for Formula One driver Jacques Villeneuve is the locus of study, revealing how this affective investment shapes and furnishes my corresponding leisure practices. Notions of gendered 'performativity' come to the fore, with my own displays evoking, enacting and revealing oscillating performances of masculinity. Moreover, there are interesting gendered dynamics that such fan leisure practices flag in terms of the intersection of female/male relationships and the potential 'fantasy' and/or narcissistic readings that a male fan identifying with and performing as another male sport star afford. Finally, my research reveals paradoxes for contemporary masculinities, with fans reliant upon mediation and commodification to facilitate and sustain their performative roles. © 2011 Taylor & Francis