Millions of people every single day log in and play video games. Games such as Fortnite, Call Of Duty, and Minecraft have very dedicated fanbases that will spend the majority of the day gaming. With so much attention on gaming, scientists decided to optimize it.
Dynamic difficulty adjustment or DDA for short, is when the difficulty level of the players game changes according to the players skill level. Researchers at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology found a way to improve DDA by skewing it towards player satisfaction. Using AI technology, real human player data was analyzed. Players would play a fighting game against the AI on many different difficulties with a questionnaire at the end.
The gamers’ satisfaction depends on one of four aspects: challenge, valence, competence, and flow. Following an experiment of 20 volunteers, they decided that they could improve all player’s experience. This is next level AI usage, and also a great idea. To be able to adjust difficulty based on emotion is a strong breakthrough for AI, and hopefully it will be adopted by the major game companies.
