Meeting Players Halfway: Using Adaptive Systems to Prevent Player Frustration

Speakers: Lida Tang

Track: Programming

Format: Lecture

Experience Level: All

Description: Two common problems that novice players encounter is lack of knowledge, and lack of skill. The problems are especially acute for deep and complex games. This session presents two concepts used in the development of BioShock, Adaptive Difficulty and Adaptive Training, that is designed to prevent player frustration by detecting failure cases and providing assistance to the player.

Adaptive Training behaves like "tool tips" for game play, providing help only when players demonstrate a lack of understanding of a particular system. This talk explains expert systems and details how they can be applied to Adaptive Training.

Idea Takeaway: Attendees will learn why adaptive systems are important and how they can reduce player frustration. Attendees will also learn techniques for implementing adaptive training and adaptive difficulty in their games. The goal is to provide techniques to make games more enjoyable to a wider audience.

Intended Audience: This talkis intended for programmers tasked with implementing an adaptive difficulty system or designers interested in moving beyond the static training sequences and difficulty levels provided in most games.