Gameplay semantics for authoring adaptivity in mobile games

Using procedural content generation (PCG) in game development can contribute to further engage players in more fun, balanced and richer gameplay. An adaptive game can achieve this by: (i) distinguishing its players’ interaction [3], and (ii) accordingly adapting game elements, using PCG [4]. We investigated adaptive mobile PCG methods with a case study on 7’s Wild Ride1, a game developed at the Entertainment Technology Center of Carnegie Mellon University. We changed the original game to include a player-dependent PCG-based dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA), and concluded that it indeed keeps the game evenly balanced for anyone, contributing to attract and retain the typical wider audience of casual mobile players. In this paper, we describe the role that gameplay semantics have in supporting this DDA mechanism, specifically by allowing designers to control PCG methods directly, thus effectively authoring adaptivity

@InProceedings { LHJB13c,
  author       = "Lopes, Ricardo and Hilf, Ken and Jayapalan, Luke and Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "Gameplay semantics for authoring adaptivity in mobile games",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of FDG 2013 - Eighth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games",
  month        = "may",
  year         = "2013",
  publisher    = "Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games",
  address      = "Chania, Crete, Greece",
  note         = "ISBN: 978-0-9913982-0-1",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2013/LHJB13c"
}