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Retaining players over an extended period of time is a long-standing challenge in game industry. Significant effort has been paid to understanding what motivates players enjoy games. While individuals may have varying reasons to play or…
The popularity of computer games is remarkably high and is still growing every year. Despite this popularity and the economical importance of gaming, research in game design, or to be more precise, of game mechanics that can be used to…
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…
The availability of massive data about sports activities offers nowadays the opportunity to quantify the relation between performance and success. In this study, we analyze more than 6,000 games and 10 million events in six European leagues…
In games with a large number of players where players may have overlapping objectives, the analysis of stable outcomes typically depends on player types. A special case is when a large part of the player population consists of imitation…
Successful and accurate modelling of level difficulty is a fundamental component of the operationalisation of player experience as difficulty is one of the most important and commonly used signals for content design and adaptation. In games…
We consider the problem of distributed convergence to efficient outcomes in coordination games through dynamics based on aspiration learning. Under aspiration learning, a player continues to play an action as long as the rewards received…
Engaging in playful activities, such as playing a musical instrument, learning a language, or performing sports, is a fundamental aspect of human life. We present a quantitative empirical analysis of the engagement dynamics into playful…
In recent years, digital games have become increasingly present in people's lives both as a leisure activity or in gamified activities of everyday life. Despite this growing presence, large-scale, data-driven analyses of video games remain…
We study the relationship between performance and practice by analyzing the activity of many players of a casual online game. We find significant heterogeneity in the improvement of player performance, given by score, and address this by…
A question of interest in both theory and practice is if and how familiarity between members of a team, expressed in terms of social network structure, relates to the success of the team in a given task. In this paper we revisit this…
The video game industry has seen rapid growth over the last decade. Thousands of video games are released and played by millions of people every year, creating a large community of players. Steam is a leading gaming platform and social…
While Artificial Intelligence has successfully outperformed humans in complex combinatorial games (such as chess and checkers), humans have retained their supremacy in social interactions that require intuition and adaptation, such as…
We study the quality of outcomes in repeated games when the population of players is dynamically changing and participants use learning algorithms to adapt to the changing environment. Game theory classically considers Nash equilibria of…
Random walks are powerful tools to analyze spatial-temporal patterns produced by living organisms ranging from cells to humans. At the same time, it is evident that these patterns are not completely random but are results of a convolution…
From sports to science, the recent availability of large-scale data has allowed to gain insights on the drivers of human innovation and success in a variety of domains. Here we quantify human performance in the popular game of chess by…
We compare complex networks built from the game of go and obtained from databases of human-played games with those obtained from computer-played games. Our investigations show that statistical features of the human-based networks and the…
Over the last several decades, computer games started to have a significant impact on society. However, although a computer game is a type of software, the process to conceptualize, produce and deliver a game could involve unusual features.…
Achievement systems have been actively adopted in gaming platforms to maintain players' interests. Among them, trophies in PlayStation games are one of the most successful achievement systems. While the importance of trophy design has been…
In many applications, we want to influence the decisions of independent agents by designing incentives for their actions. We revisit a fundamental problem in this area, called GAME IMPLEMENTATION: Given a game in standard form and a set of…