Feeling Angry? Scientists Develop Video Games Difficulty Model That Adjusts To Your Emotions
Are you feeling fine and in the zone? Or maybe you're hot and bothered? Irritable and frustrated? Or perhaps sad and melancholic? While all sorts of games exist for many varieties of mood, it might be a good idea for a video game to adjust its difficulty based on how the player is feeling. Because feeling continuously angry at a game might not be so fun or that good for you.
Scientists in South Korea, at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, have devised a rather intriguing method for such a thing. The researchers have developed a dynamic difficulty model that would adjust according to the players' emotions and tweak it accordingly to ensure player satisfaction is maximised. Because who doesn't like maximum satisfaction?
Related: There's Nothing As Satisfying As Winning At Fighting Games
Game developers have long known about the balancing required when it comes to game difficulty and player progression, trying to find a sweet spot that is neither too hard or too easy to make sure the playing experience feels good. While settings can usually be changed, this often requires the player to manually adjust the setting. The Korean scientists are proposing something much more dynamic.
Their model involves training dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) agents, using machine learning that has gathered data from human players, which then adjust the game's difficulty in order to maximise one of four different aspects related to a player's satisfaction: challenge, competence, flow, and valence.
The scientists used a fighting game for their model and to train their DDA agents, as the human players played the fighting game against AI opponents, generating data for the agents, and the humans also had to answer a
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