Real-time adaptive track generation in racing games

Real-time Adaptive Track Generation in Racing Game

Towards player-driven procedural content generation

Generating immersive game content is one of the ultimate goals for a game designer. This goal can be achieved by realizing the fact that players' perception of the same game differ according to a number of factors including: players' personality, playing styles, expertise and culture background. While one player might find the game immersive, others may quit playing as a result of encountering a seemingly insoluble problem. One promising avenue towards optimizing the gameplay experience for individual game players is to tailor player experience in real-time via automatic game content generation. Specifying the aspects of the game that have the major influence on the gameplay experience, identifying the relationship between these aspect and each individual experience and defining a mechanism for tailoring the game content according to each individual needs are important steps towards player-driven content generation.peer-reviewe

Towards procedural level generation for rehabilitation

This paper introduces the concept of procedural content generation for physical rehabilitation. In this initial study a ski-slalom game is developed on the Wii platform that procedurally places the gates of the game according to player performance. A preliminary game evaluation study is conducted on patients with injured legs and showcases the efficiency of the procedural gate generation mechanism tailoring the game difficulty to match rehabilitation goals. The study also validates certain usability aspects of the patients.peer-reviewe

Enhancing health care via affective computing

Affective computing is a multidisciplinary field that studies the various ways by which computational processes are able to elicit, sense, and detect manifestations of human emotion. While the methods and technology delivered by affective computing have demonstrated very promising results across several domains, their adoption by healthcare is still at its initial stages. With that aim in mind, this commentary paper introduces affective computing to the readership of the journal and praises for the benefits of affect-enabled systems for prognostic, diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.peer-reviewe

Towards automatic personalized content generation for platform games

In this paper, we show that personalized levels can be automatically generated for platform games. We build on previous work, where models were derived that predicted player experience based on features of level design and on playing styles. These models are constructed using preference learning, based on questionnaires administered to players after playing different levels. The contributions of the current paper are (1) more accurate models based on a much larger data set; (2) a mechanism for adapting level design parameters to given players and playing style; (3) evaluation of this adaptation mechanism using both algorithmic and human players. The results indicate that the adaptation mechanism effectively optimizes level design parameters for particular players.peer-reviewe

Pressure at play:measuring player approach and avoidance behaviour through the keyboard

With the increased adoption of real-time objective measurements of player experience, advances have been made in characterising the dynamically changing aspects of the player experience during gameplay itself. A direct coupling to player action, however, is not without challenges. Many physiological responses, for instance, have an inherent delay, and often take some time to return to a baseline, providing challenges of interpretation when analysing rapidly changing gameplay on a micro level of interaction. The development of event-related, or phasic, measurements directly coupled to player actions provides additional insights, for instance through player modelling, but also through the use of behavioural characteristics of the human computer interaction itself. In this study, we focused on the latter, and measured keyboard pressure in a number of different, fast-paced action games. In this particular case, we related specific functional game actions (keyboard presses) to experiential player behaviour. We found keyboard pressure to be higher for avoidance as compared to approach-oriented actions. Additionally, the difference between avoidance and approach keyboard pressure related to levels of arousal. The findings illustrate the application potential of qualifying players’ functional actions at play (navigating in a game) and interpret player experience related to these actions through players’ real world behavioural characteristics like interface pressure

Experience-driven procedural content generation (extended abstract)

Procedural content generation is an increasingly important area of technology within modern human-computer interaction with direct applications in digital games, the semantic web, and interface, media and software design. The personalization of experience via the modeling of the user, coupled with the appropriate adjustment of the content according to user needs and preferences are important steps towards effective and meaningful content generation. This paper introduces a framework for procedural content generation driven by computational models of user experience we name Experience-Driven Procedural Content Generation. While the framework is generic and applicable to various subareas of human computer interaction, we employ games as an indicative example of content-intensive software that enables rich forms of interaction.The research was supported, in part, by the FP7 ICT projects C2Learn (318480) and iLearnRW (318803).peer-reviewe