Related papers: Statistical Modelling of Level Difficulty in Puzzl…
Difficulty is one of the key drivers of player engagement and it is often one of the aspects that designers tweak most to optimise the player experience; operationalising it is, therefore, a crucial task for game development studios. A…
In this work we investigate whether it is plausible to use the performance of a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to estimate the difficulty measured as the player completion rate of different levels in the mobile puzzle game Lily's…
The accurate and personalized estimation of task difficulty provides many opportunities for optimizing user experience. However, user diversity makes such difficulty estimation hard, in that empirical measurements from some user sample do…
With increasing interest in procedural content generation by academia and game developers alike, it is vital that different approaches can be compared fairly. However, evaluating procedurally generated video game levels is often difficult,…
Tasks of different nature and difficulty levels are a part of people's lives. In this context, there is a scientific interest in the relationship between the difficulty of the task and the persistence need to accomplish it. Despite the…
Arithmetic puzzle games provide a controlled setting for studying difficulty in mathematical reasoning tasks, a core challenge in adaptive learning systems. We investigate the structural determinants of difficulty in a class of integer…
StepMania is a popular open-source clone of a rhythm-based video game. As is common in popular games, there is a large number of community-designed levels. It is often difficult for players and level authors to determine the difficulty…
Understanding player strategies is a key question when analyzing player behavior both for academic researchers and industry practitioners. For game designers and game user researchers, it is important to gauge the distance between intended…
Methods for dynamic difficulty adjustment allow games to be tailored to particular players to maximize their engagement. However, current methods often only modify a limited set of game features such as the difficulty of the opponents, or…
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential as autonomous agents across various tasks. One emerging application is the use of LLMs in playing games. In this work, we explore a practical problem for the…
Balancing games, especially those with asymmetric multiplayer content, requires significant manual effort and extensive human playtesting during development. For this reason, this work focuses on generating balanced levels tailored to…
We present an approach to generate novel computer game levels that blend different game concepts in an unsupervised fashion. Our primary contribution is an analogical reasoning process to construct blends between level design models learned…
Procedural content generation via machine learning (PCGML) in games involves using machine learning techniques to create game content such as maps and levels. 2D tile-based game levels have consistently served as a standard dataset for…
While traditionally a labour intensive task, the testing of game content is progressively becoming more automated. Among the many directions in which this automation is taking shape, automatic play-testing is one of the most promising…
Curriculum learning--ordering training examples in a sequence to aid machine learning--takes inspiration from human learning, but has not gained widespread acceptance. Static strategies for scoring item difficulty rely on indirect proxy…
An accurate assessment of a model's complexity is crucial for topics such as interpretation, generalization, and model selection. However, most existing complexity measures either rely on heuristic assumptions or are computationally…
Estimating discrete games of complete information is often computationally difficult due to partial identification and the absence of closed-form moment characterizations. This paper proposes computationally tractable approaches to…
Games often incorporate random elements in the form of dice or shuffled card decks. This randomness is a key contributor to the player experience and the variety of game situations encountered. There is a tension between a level of…
With increasing game size, a problem of computational complexity arises. This is especially true in real world problems such as in social systems, where there is a significant population of players involved in the game, and the complexity…
Similarity estimation is essential for many game AI applications, from the procedural generation of distinct assets to automated exploration with game-playing agents. While similarity metrics often substitute human evaluation, their…