Player Experience and Deceptive Expectations of Difficulty Adaptation in Digital Games

In short

Does telling players that a game adapts to them change their experience, whether or not it really does? In two studies with two games using different performance-based adaptations, we varied both what players were told and whether adaptation was present.

In games

Adaptation players don't see

Our example

Resident Evil 4

2005

Quietly adjusts its difficulty to how well you play, and most players never notice. What players believe a game is doing may matter as much as what it does.

The game in Study II

“Trick or Treat”: a character in a Halloween town with a health bar and a pumpkin counter of sweets collected. — “Trick or Treat”, the Halloween-themed game developed for Study II. © Alena Denisova

How the studies worked

Study I

Game: Nightmares, modified to have an adaptive timer
Players: 120
Design: 2 × 3 between-subject: adaptive or standard timer × no, partial or full information
What players were told: Partial information: that the timer adjusted based on their performance, but not what exactly this adaptation did. Full information: how the adaptation changed their gameplay based on their performance.
Adaptation: The time sped up or slowed down based on the player’s performance at discrete points in the game
Play time: 1.5 minutes (or what appeared to be 1.5 minutes in the adaptive condition)
Measures: IEQ and game scores

Study II

Game: “Trick or Treat”, a Halloween-themed game developed for the study in Unity
Players: 60
Design: (2 × 2) × 2 mixed measures: some or no information about the concept of adaptation
Adaptation: The number of sweets collected on each level adapts the difficulty of the next level: enemies’ detection radius, the player’s health and attack strength
Play time: Two 10-minute sessions
Measures: IEQ after each session, plus levels completed, deaths per level and difficulty changes

Key findings

Players felt more immersed when told the game adapts to them, even when it did not.
The effect appeared in both games and remained strong over longer play sessions.
Developers may not need to worry about telling players about adaptation, at least in some circumstances.

What this means for games user research

Even a casual reference to specific game factors could bias the results of playtesting and games user research.
Conclusions
It is important to keep the language used to describe the game as neutral as possible.
Conclusions

Read and cite

PDF (accepted version) Publisher's version (DOI)

APA citation

Denisova, A., & Cairns, P. (2019). Player Experience and Deceptive Expectations of Difficulty Adaptation in Digital Games. Entertainment Computing, 29, 56-68.

Line of work

Builds on · 2015Adaptation in Digital Games: The Effect of Challenge Adjustment on Player Performance and Experience
Builds on · 2015The Placebo Effect in Digital Games: Phantom Perception of Adaptive Artificial Intelligence
This paper · 2019Player Experience and Deceptive Expectations of Difficulty Adaptation in Digital Games