inFlow: Adapting Gameplay to Player's Personality

Year:

2010

Phase:

Finished

Authors:

Rodrigo Manuel Lopes Dias

Advisors:

Abstract

In this document, we present a videogame that adapts its content to the player. Such a game needs to infer the player's type from his behavior, and then select how content is managed and presented to the player based on that type. In this work we focus on the later aspect, assuming we already know the player type. We also propose how such information can be used to enhance the player?s experience. After revising the literature on the subject, we decided to use the Demographic Game Design (DGD) model as our player model. Therefore, before playing our game, the player has to fill a questionnaire to assess his Myer-Briggs personality type. From this questionnaire, the game classifies the player according to the DGD model. The game is then adjusted according to this player type, which will influence how the information of the game is presented to the player, in three main aspects: presentation, difficulty management and depth of control over aspects of the game. To evaluate our approach, we asked different types of players to play our game under different conditions and evaluated the experience using a final questionnaire based on the GameFlow model. The evaluation suggests that the player enjoyment is higher when the game is using our framework to adapt to the player.