M. Sc. Julia Brich, member of the research group Weber, discusses her phd thesis project.
Abstract: Adapting digital games to player skills and preferences is an emerging trend in the game industry.Increased personalization is thought to improve player experience and boost long-term player engagement. This cannot only help to increase sales, but also benefit serious game approaches promoting healthy lifestyles, learning, or sustainability efforts with the help of games. Even academia profits from more engaging experiences, as games are increasingly used as research tools in user studies.
For adaptation to be successful, games need to be able to choose the design expression of a game element most suitable for a given player at the right time during play. Adaptable game elements include difficulty, atmosphere, quest design, personality of non-player characters, and game mechanics among others.
Based on theories and research methods from psychology research, this interdisciplinary work originally aimed at employing motivation questionnaires to determine player experience for further use in a just-in-time adaptation approach for digital games. Findings indicate that motivational effects of different game element design expressions seem undetectable with the commonly employed questionnaires, even when players express clear preferences in qualitative feedback. This thesis will thus further investigate the potential of a methodological shift away from stealth assessment & stealth adaptation towards a cooperative adaptation approach between player and game and its impact on player experience.
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