Skip to content

An Automatically Tailored Experience

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Digital games need to keep players engaged. Since games are interactive media, achieving this goal means that game designers need to anticipate player actions to create a pre-designed experience. Traditionally, developers have achieved this by restricting player freedom to a strict set of actions thereby curating player experience and ensuring the fun factor. However, games are taking a different route with more users making their own content (User Generated Content, UGC) through extensive creativity tools which make it hard to predict player experience.

Vincent E. Farrugia
Vincent E. Farrugia

To overcome these challenges Vincent E. Farrugia (supervised by Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis), merged game design and artificial intelligence (AI). He developed a software framework for handling player engagement in environments which feature user generated content and groups. The three pronged solution tackles problems during game production, playing the game itself, and making sure the framework is sustainable. To maintain engagement within groups he analysed data for a particular person within the group but also patterns common across the whole group. Farrugia created software tools, autonomous AI aids, and tools to test and support the framework.

The software framework is made up of inter-operating modules. Firstly, an engagement policy module allows designers to specify theories to express their vision of positive game engagement. Player modelling then shapes this backbone to specific player engagement needs. The module can autonomously learn from player creations as reactions to game stimuli. Individual and group manager modules use this mixture of expert knowledge, AI learnt data, and player game-play history to automatically adapt game content to solve player engagement problems. This procedural content generation (PCG) is tailored for a specific player and time.

The framework’s abilities were showcased in a digital game also developed by Farrugia. Various technologies were incorporated to encourage player creativity in group sessions and to enhance networking. The setup also allowed the AI to quickly learn from each player via parallelism. Initial testing used a simulated environment with software agents. Preliminary testing on real players followed. The simulation was through a personality system to validate the underlying algorithms under various conditions. The resulting diverse game-play styles provide suggestions for AI model improvement. Farrugia is enthusiastic about future work for this AI framework and giving developers better tools to allow player creativity to flourish while maintaining positive game-play experiences. 


This research was performed as part of a Master of Science degree at the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta. It was partly funded by the Strategic Educational Pathways Scholarship (Malta), which is part-financed by the European Union—European Social Fund (ESF) under Operational Programme II—Cohesion Policy 2007—2013, ‘Empowering People for More Jobs and a Better Quality of Life’.

Author

More to Explore

INNOVATION

‘Fun, exciting and challenging’ is how Federica, NOVA logistics officer, described her undergraduate experience with UM’s Department of Digital Arts. Now in their final year, the Bachelor of Fine Arts cohort, guided by Dr Trevor Borg, is dotting all the i’s and crossing all their t’s in preparation for their thesis exhibition. THINK took the opportunity to talk with a few members of the logistics team to learn what NOVA is all about.

Exploring Additional Functionality for Home Battery Storage Systems

Using renewable energy, like solar photovoltaic, to generate electricity for direct use and to electrify other sectors significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, the intermittent nature and dependence on solar irradiation – the amount of energy the sun puts out at a time – complicate the operation of the power network. Home battery storage systems can assist in multiple ways.

Unlocking Knowledge: The Power of Open Access to Research Data

Research Data Management offers researchers a way to safeguard their findings and a pathway to collaboration, efficiency, and greater recognition for their work. At its core, research data forms the foundation of every scholarly discovery, making Open Access essential for more transparent and reusable research.

Comments are closed for this article!