Experience-Driven Procedural Content Generation

Abstract

Abstract-Procedural content generation (PCG) is an increasingly important area of technology within modern human-computer interaction (HCI) design. Personalization of user experience via affective and cognitive modeling, coupled with real-time adjustment of the content according to user needs and preferences are important steps towards effective and meaningful PCG. Games, Web 2.0, interface and software design are amongst the most popular applications of automated content generation. The paper provides a taxonomy of PCG algorithms and introduces a framework for PCG driven by computational models of user experience. This approach, which we call Experience-Driven Procedural Content Generation (EDPCG), is generic and applicable to various subareas of HCI. We employ games as an indicative example of rich HCI and complex affect elicitation, and demonstrate the approach's effectiveness via dissimilar successful studies.

Give me a reason to dig Minecraft and psychology of motivation

“…Yannakakis and Togelius [36] focus on methods for modeling the experience of the player, and categorize such methods mainly according to the source of the data: subjective (questionnaires of various kinds), objective (based on physiological, psychophysiological or other physical measurements such as skin conductivity or analysis of facial expressions) and gameplay-based (actions the player takes in the game). Within each of these categories, several alternatives are listed, such as whether the measurements are structured according to some model and whether the questionnaires deal with preferences or ratings.…”

A Game-Based Corpus for Analysing the Interplay between Game Context and Player Experience

“…The questionnaire asks the player to report the preferred game for three user states: engagement, challenge and frustration. The selection of these states is based on earlier game survey studies [15] and our intention to capture both affective and cognitive/behavioral components of gameplay experience [25]. Moreover, we want to keep the self-reporting as minimal as possible so that experience disruption is minimized.…”

Toward supporting stories with procedurally generated game worlds

“…Search-based procedural content generation (SBPCG) involves the use of search-based algorithms to explore a space of game content for those meeting a set of evaluation criteria [13]. Examples of content generated using SBPCG include: decorations of virtual environments such as trees and other vegetation; landscapes and 3D environmental geometry; weapons; opponents; game levels; and quests [13], [16]. Work on SBPCG has focused mainly on non-story-driven game genres such as platformers, racing games, and shooters.…”

“…Many efforts have recently aimed to incorporate player preferences in the field known as experience-driven procedural content generation [16]. Within this framework our system uses a subjective player experience model by directly asking about player preferences.…”