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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…
Souls-like games exemplify how digital play can produce radical forms of pleasure through sustained challenge: players voluntarily invest tens or hundreds of hours in experiences designed to kill them repeatedly. This paper theorizes ordeal…
We describe nearly fifteen years of General Game Playing experimental research history in the context of reproducibility and fairness of comparisons between various GGP agents and systems designed to play games described by different…
Much in the same way that people enjoy, from time to time, the pathos of consuming a tragic film or piece of literature, designers of digital games are increasingly including elements within their games that evoke uncomfortable or negative…
In this study into the player's emotional theory of mind of gameplaying agents, we investigate how an agent's behaviour and the player's own performance and emotions shape the recognition of a frustrated behaviour. We focus on the…
Gameplay research about experiential phenomena is a challenging undertaking, given the variety of experiences that gamers encounter when playing and which currently do not have a formal taxonomy, such as flow, immersion, boredom, and fun.…
Usability engineering and usability testing are concepts that continue to evolve. Interesting research studies and new ideas come up every now and then. This paper tests the hypothesis of using an EDA based physiological measurements as a…
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…
The presence or absence of winner-loser effects is a widely discussed phenomenon across both sports and psychology research. Investigation of such effects is often hampered by the limited availability of data. Online chess has exploded in…
We propose the study of mathematical ludology, which aims to formally interrogate questions of interest to game studies and game design in particular. The goal is to extend our mathematical understanding of complex games beyond…
Games are usually created incrementally, requiring repeated testing of the same scenarios, which is a tedious and error-prone task for game developers. Therefore, we aim to alleviate this game testing process by encapsulating it into a game…
The process of playtesting a game is subjective, expensive and incomplete. In this paper, we present a playtesting approach that explores the game space with automated agents and collects data to answer questions posed by the designers.…
Video game designers often view confusion as undesirable, yet it is inevitable, as new players must adapt to new interfaces and mechanics in an increasingly varied and innovative game market, which is more popular than ever. Research…
This paper examines how player flexibility -- a player's willingness to engage in a breadth of options or specialize -- manifests across two gaming environments: League of Legends (League) and Teamfight Tactics (TFT). We analyze the…
Deceptive game designs that manipulate players are increasingly common in the gaming industry, but the impact on players is not well studied. While studies have revealed player frustration, there is a gap in understanding how cultural…
Different errors that occur in video games are often referred to as glitches or bugs. The goal of this exploratory research is to understand how these glitches and bugs within video games affect a players experience. To do this, I reviewed…
The goal of this exploratory research is to investigate how glitches and bugs within video games affect a players overall experience. The severity or frequency of bugs, as well as the nature of the bugs present, could influence how the…
Game difficulty is a crucial aspect of game design, that can be directly influenced by tweaking game mechanics. Perceived difficulty can however also be influenced by simply altering the graphics to something more threatening. Here, we…
Hedonic games provide a natural model of coalition formation among self-interested agents. The associated problem of finding stable outcomes in such games has been extensively studied. In this paper, we identify simple conditions on…
A repeated game is an effective tool to model interactions and conflicts for players aiming to achieve their objectives in a long-term basis. Contrary to static noncooperative games that model an interaction among players in only one…