Measuring player experience on runtime dynamic difficulty scaling in an RTS game

  • Authors:

  • Johan Hagelbäck;Stefan J. Johansson

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Computing, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Ronneby, Sweden;School of Computing, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Ronneby, Sweden

  • Venue:
  • CIG'09 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Computational Intelligence and Games
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Do players find it more enjoyable to win, than to play even matches? We have made a study of what a number of players expressed after playing against computer opponents of different kinds in an RTS game. There were two static computer opponents, one that was easily beaten, and one that was hard to beat, and three dynamic ones that adapted their strength to that of the player. One of these three latter ones intentionally drops its performance in the end of the game to make it easy for the player to win. Our results indicate that the players found it more enjoyable to play an even game against an opponent that adapts to the performance of the player, than playing against an opponent with static difficulty. The results also show that when the computer player that dropped its performance to let the player win was the least enjoyable opponent of them all.