Related papers: Seeding for Success: Skill and Stochasticity in Ta…

Randomness is an important factor in games, so much so that some games rely almost purely on it for its outcomes and increase players' engagement with them. However, randomness can affect the game experience depending on when it occurs in a…

Creating and evaluating games manually is an arduous and laborious task. Procedural content generation can aid by creating game artifacts, but usually not an entire game. Evolutionary game design, which combines evolutionary algorithms with…

This paper presents a data-driven statistical framework to quantify the role of skill in games, addressing the long-standing question of whether success in a game is predominantly driven by skill or chance. We analyze player level data from…

We consider two-player zero-sum games on graphs. These games can be classified on the basis of the information of the players and on the mode of interaction between them. On the basis of information the classification is as follows: (a)…

Game theory is the study of tractable games which may be used to model more complex systems. Board games, video games and sports, however, are intractable by design, so "ludological" theories about these games as complex phenomena should be…

We introduce a quantitative framework for separating skill and chance in games by modeling them as complementary sources of control over stochastic decision trees. We define the Skill-Luck Index S(G) in [-1, 1] by decomposing game outcomes…

We present a new way of estimation of the role of chance in achieving success, by comparing the empirical data from 100-meter dash competitions (one of the sports disciplines with the most stringent controls of external randomness), with…

Stochastic games are a natural model for the synthesis of controllers confronted to adversarial and/or random actions. In particular, $\omega$-regular games of infinite length can represent reactive systems which are not expected to reach a…

The paper aims to investigate the degree of cognitive skills required for success in online versions of the popular card game rummy and poker. The study focuses on analyzing the impact of experience and learnable skills on success in the…

Challenges for physical solitaire puzzle games are typically designed in advance by humans and limited in number. Alternatively, some games incorporate rules for stochastic setup, where the human solver randomly sets up the game board…

Gauging an individual's skill level is crucial, as it inherently shapes their behavior. Quantifying skill, however, is challenging because it is latent to the observed actions. To explore skill understanding in human behavior, we focus on…

Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…

Many fields view stochasticity as a way to gain computational efficiency, while often having to trade off accuracy. In this perspective article, we argue that stochasticity plays a fundamentally different role in machine learning (ML) and…

Game balancing is an important part of the (computer) game design process, in which designers adapt a game prototype so that the resulting gameplay is as entertaining as possible. In industry, the evaluation of a game is often based on…

This paper studies the optimization of strategies in the context of possibly randomized two players zero-sum games with incomplete information. We compare 5 algorithms for tuning the parameters of strategies over a benchmark of 12 games. A…

In the game of Scrabble, letter tiles are drawn uniformly at random from a bag. The variability of possible draws as the game progresses is a source of variation that makes it more likely for an inferior player to win a head-to-head match…

As the complexity and scope of games increase, game testing, also called playtesting, becomes an essential activity to ensure the quality of video games. Yet, the manual, ad-hoc nature of game testing leaves space for automation. In this…

We study a class of stochastic dynamic games that exhibit strategic complementarities between players; formally, in the games we consider, the payoff of a player has increasing differences between her own state and the empirical…

This work investigates the role of uncertainty in Slay the Spire using an information-theoretic framework. Focusing on the entropy of game paths (which are based on procedurally-generated maps) we analyze how randomness influences player…

We introduce a new class of games where each player's aim is to randomise her strategic choices in order to affect the other players' expectations aside from her own. The way each player intends to exert this influence is expressed through…