Lecture 6 - Procedural Content and Player Models

Procedural Content and Player Modelling

Recap • Yesterday ‣ Talked about how we can generate things inside the game automatically. ‣ Discussed difﬁculty systems and how we can adapt our PCG systems to take difﬁculty into account • Last week ‣ How we can model a player as a datapoint and use that to better inform our AI systems2

Motivation • Is the purpose of AI to create “unbeatable” games? • Games should be ‣ Challenging ‣ Rewarding ‣ Entertaining • AI can be a central tool for managing the player’s experience. • AI to create engagement between player and game3

Silent Hill : Shattered Memories • AAA title in the Silent Hill series. Horror genre. • Opens with a psychologist analysing the main character. • This is an actual psychological test ‣ Of the player! • Based on the classiﬁcation that the test generates, game is customised in several ways.4

Silent Hill : Shattered Memories • Next few slides are based on material presented by Gwaredd Mountain, Technical Director for Climax on SH:SM5

Silent Hill : Shattered Memories Stick images from Paris ’10 here DISC Personality Model6

Silent Hill : Shattered Memories • Myers-Briggs “Dichotomies” ‣ Extraversion / Introversion ‣ Sensing / Intuition ‣ Thinking / Feeling ‣ Judgement / Perception7

Silent Hill : Shattered Memories • Content is selected based on player classiﬁcation. ‣ Note that it isn’t generated. • Effectively, three different sets of content written ‣ Game shows you the most appropriate one based on your psychological proﬁle8

Silent Hill : Shattered Memories9

Silent Hill : Shattered Memories10

Modelling Players • It’s rare that we get to run a psychological proﬁle on players as part of the game. • It’s about as rare that we can afford to create multiple copies of assets targeted at speciﬁc classes of player. • How can we get around this?11

Player Observation • The best way is to monitor what people are doing in the game. • We can build up a model of players ‣ See what they are doing ‣ Understand why they’re doing it ‣ Tailor their experience speciﬁcally to their tastes12

Player Observation • Metrics! • Logs! • One of the simplest ways hinges on use of Google Analytics. • Libraries exist to streamline the process.13

Observation with Google Analytics • “Traditional” use of GA ‣ Web page is loaded ‣ Small piece of javascript is executed ‣ Contacts Google systems and creates a log entry - Non-identifying info about the user and computer - Page being requested - Several parameters speciﬁed by the website14

Observation with Google Analytics • All the Javascript is really doing is formatting and sending a request to a Google web server. • We can create and spoof this same action inside a game environment ‣ Or any application • Then, we can use the GA reporting tools to see a range of player metrics.15

What might we want to track? • Start-up ‣ This lets us get some information about how many people are playing, where they are coming from and so on. • Item collection ‣ We can’t track physical location of a player (too much data) but we can infer from things like item collection.16

What might we want to track? • Player death ‣ This is a big one - we need to know when the player dies and where. Why would also be good. We can pass these in using the parameters mentioned previously • Player kills ‣ It might be good to know where our players are when the kill something. What they killed. How they killed it17

Drawbacks of Google Analytics • GA doesn’t allow you to track speciﬁc individuals. • Hacking this into the analytic data is a violation of Google ToS, account may be banned. • Means we can only track general trends about players.18

Working with Trends • One of the most important things we can use this for is to track kill and death locations. • This can give us a good understanding of areas within a map that are advantageous and dangerous • We can feed this into an AI system to automatically avoid or be cautious in the dangerous areas ‣ Understand the map without actual “understanding” • Also useful during design, monitoring ﬂow etc.19

Creating Models • Need bespoke solutions for more granular analysis of players. • Want to see speciﬁc information about speciﬁc players • Understand what type of players aspects of the game are appealing to. ‣ Need to classify players into types then.20

Bartle Player Types • Richard Bartle gives a well used profiling system based on a set of game-scenario questions • Classifies players into four types ‣ Explorer, Achiever, Socialiser, Killer • A player’s Bartle Quotient scores out of a total of up to 200% affinity for each type ‣ No single rating higher than 100%21

Bartle Player Types • Explorer ‣ Players who “dig around” ‣ Enjoy discovering areas, learning about the world ‣ Find glitches and easter eggs22

Bartle Player Types • Achiever ‣ Players who want to gain points, levels or gear. ‣ In it for the glory (even if it is minor, fake in-game glory) ‣ Will go to great lengths to accomplish various challenges23

Bartle Player Types • Socialiser ‣ The game is a mechanism for social interaction. ‣ Single player - able to join in with others on discussion ‣ Multi-player - participate in online groups, create engagement with others24

Bartle Player Types • Killer ‣ What it says on the tin, interested in destruction ‣ Also into seeing their actions have high impact in worlds - May be positive or negative impacts ‣ May use non-standard techniques e.g. economic war25

My Type • Explorer - 67% • Socialiser - 67% • Killer - 40% • Achiever - 27% • Test taken : http://www.gamerdna.com/quizzes/ bartle-test-of-gamer-psychology26

Players in Tomb Raider Underworld • Researchers from ITU Copenhagen put data logging into Tomb Raider Underworld on Xbox. • Gathered four distinct metrics ‣ Causes of death ‣ Total number of deaths ‣ Completion time ‣ Use of “Help on Demand” system27

Players in Tomb Raider Underworld • Classiﬁed into four distinct groups • Veterans ‣ Fast progression, few deaths, little help • Solvers ‣ Good puzzle solving, slow progression, bad navigation • Paciﬁsts ‣ Good navigation, poor response to threats • Runners ‣ Very fast progression, many deaths28

Further Metrics and Analytics • The better you understand the player, the better you understand your customer. • Analytics and Metrics are where AI techniques overlap with business development. • Outwith the scope of this course • Games Analytics (based in Edinburgh) presented at IGDA Scotland’s October meeting. Link on MyPlace29

Player Models for PCG • We talked yesterday about Procedural Content Generation. • We saw in SH:SM that a model of a player could be used to select one of several moods for a game. • We can tie the player classiﬁcation more directly to PCG to alter the experience in a less clunky way30

Mario Level Generation • Asked yesterday how we could alter difﬁculty in a Mario style game. • Let’s look ﬁrst at how we can model players in this game. • Fortunately, our friends at ITU Copenhagen have done the hard work already. Again!31

Player Modelling in Mario • Model a range of features in six categories ‣ Jumps - total number of jumps, number of gaps ‣ Time - completion time, per-life time ‣ Items - number of items collected, % of coins collected ‣ Death - number of times player died by cause ‣ Kill - ratio of different ways of killing enemies ‣ “Misc” - number of times run, number of times ducked32

Player Modelling in Mario • Also makes use of surveys on a batch of play- testers. • Allows for more thorough analysis of a speciﬁc group of players. ‣ More detailed training data33

Level Modelling in Mario • We can categorise each level based on a number of features of the level ‣ Number of gaps ‣ Width of gaps ‣ “Spatial diversity of gaps” ‣ Number of “direction switches”34

Mapping Levels to Players • Correlation based on 3 metrics ‣ Fun ‣ Challenge ‣ Frustration • We can now associate different player types to different level types • We’ve learnt what each type of player enjoys in a level.35

Procedurally Generating Content • “Inﬁnite Mario” is an adaptation of Mario that generates new levels for the player. ‣ No end game. • We can tie the generator into the system we’ve just described to classify players and maps. • We can give players more of what they like36

Dynamic Difficulty • We talked yesterday about selection of a fixed difficulty system. • The ways we can change a variety of factors to provide variable challenge to the player. • Can we use the profiling techniques we’ve seen to automatically determine what difficulty level to present to the player?37

Simplistic Dynamic Difﬁculty • Think about Poker. • Say everything we talked about last week works. • We now have a (fairly) unbeatable Poker AI. • How can we dynamically adjust its strength?38

Simplistic Dynamic Difficulty • So the easiest way to implement dynamic difficulty in this system is to simply change what the AI is trying to do. • We expect that it wants to maximise its reward. • Change this so that big rewards are less desirable. • This is a Utility Function - redefining the concept of “optimal” to suit the aim (player satisfaction)39

Simplistic Dynamic Difficulty • What we’re really talking about is defining mathematically a process by which our “unbeatable” AI will deliberately take a dive. • In Decision Making terms, we’re going to choose the “wrong” action to take ‣ “Lose with style” Brian Schwab, Blizzard Entertainment • The rate we do this is determined by our profile of the player’s strength.40

Dynamic Difficulty in Strategy Games • Johanson and Hagelback made an interesting user study of Dynamic Difficulty in the context of a 2- player strategy game. • Each turn the player got to make an action • Dynamic Difficulty - Depending on the strength of the player’s forces, enemy may not make a move this turn.41

Ability vs Challenge • One thing of note is that certain players use difﬁculty as an indicator of desired challenge. • I’m a fairly good player, I could play on hard. • I choose to play on lower settings because the experience (e.g. narrative) is more important to me than challenge. • Good Dynamic Difﬁculty systems cater to this.42

Turing Tantrums • Session from GDC (technology permitting)43

Reading • ““Player Modeling using Self-Organization in Tomb Raider: Underworld” Drachen, Canossa and Yannakakis, Proceedings of CIG 2009 • “Measuring Player Experience on Runtime Dynamic Difﬁculty Scaling in an RTS Game” Hagelback and Johansson, Proceedings of CIG 2009 • “Modelling Player Experience in Super Mario Bros” Pedersen, Togelius,Yannakakis, Proceedings of CIG 200944

Summary • Player modelling as psychological proﬁling • Adapting/generating content based on models • Dynamic Difﬁculty systems based on models45

Next Week • Looking at other stuff we can do with AI in the context of games.46

Lecture 6 - Procedural Content and Player Models

by Luke Dicken on Dec 04, 2011

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Lecture 6 - Procedural Content and Player Models — Presentation Transcript