research-article

Public Access

Integrating Players’ Perspectives in AI-Based Games: Case Studies of Player-AI Interaction Design

Authors:

Jennifer Villareale,

Sai Siddartha Maram,

Magy Seif El-Nasr,

Jichen ZhuAuthors Info & Claims

FDG '23: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

Article No.: 6, Pages 1 - 9

https://doi.org/10.1145/3582437.3582451

Published: 12 April 2023 Publication History

All formats PDF

Abstract

The game design community has a long history of adapting different forms of AI techniques to produce new playable experiences. However, current AI-based game design literature focuses primarily on designers’ intent and expression. This paper argues that engaging with players’ perspectives on AI during development is an essential but often overlooked piece in existing AI-based game design processes. By integrating this perspective, game designers can better outline how players may experience AI in the context of games and tailor design decisions to the intended experience. This paper offers three case studies that incorporate the player perspective into the design process and discusses design implications.

References

[1]

Henri Bomström, Markus Kelanti, Jouni Lappalainen, Elina Annanperä, and Kari Liukkunen. 2020. Synchronizing Game and AI Design in PCG-Based Game Prototypes. In International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 1–8.

[2]

Bram P Buunk. 1995. Comparison direction and comparison dimension among disabled individuals: Toward a refined conceptualization of social comparison under stress. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 21, 4 (1995), 316–330.

[3]

Gabriele Cimolino, Sam Lee, Quentin Petraroia, and TC Nicholas Graham. 2019. Oui, Chef!!: Supervised Learning for Novel Gameplay with Believable AI. In Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts. 241–246.

Digital Library

[4]

Michael Cook, Mirjam Eladhari, Andy Nealen, Mike Treanor, Eddy Boxerman, Alex Jaffe, Paul Sottosanti, and Steve Swink. 2016. Pcg-based game design patterns. arXiv preprint arXiv:1610.03138(2016).

[5]

Catherine Courage and Kathy Baxter. 2005. Understanding your users: A practical guide to user requirements methods, tools, and techniques. Gulf Professional Publishing.

[6]

Magy Seif El-Nasr, Anders Drachen, and Alessandro Canossa. 2016. Game analytics. Springer.

[7]

Mirjam P Eladhari, Anne Sullivan, Gillian Smith, and Josh McCoy. 2011. AI-based game design: Enabling new playable experiences. UC Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering, Santa Cruz, CA (2011).

[8]

Leon Festinger. 1954. A theory of social comparison processes. Human relations 7, 2 (1954), 117–140.

[9]

Tracy Fullerton. 2014. Game design workshop: a playcentric approach to creating innovative games. CRC press.

[10]

Sarah Gibbons. 2018. Journey Mapping 101. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-101/

[11]

Google. 2016. Quick, Draw!Website. https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/

[12]

John Graham, Liya Zheng, and Cleotilde Gonzalez. 2006. A Cognitive Approach to Game Usability and Design: Mental Model Development in Novice Real-Time Strategy Gamers. CyberPsychology & Behavior 9, 3 (2006), 361–366.

[13]

Robert C Gray, Jennifer Villareale, Thomas Boyd Fox, Diane H Dallal, Santiago Ontañón, Danielle Arigo, Shahin Jabbari, and Jichen Zhu. 2023. Improving Fairness in Social Exergames via Shapley Bandits. Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI’23) (2023).

Digital Library

[14]

Robert C Gray, Jichen Zhu, Danielle Arigo, Evan Forman, and Santiago Ontañón. 2020. Player modeling via multi-armed bandits. In International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 1–8.

Digital Library

[15]

David Ha and Douglas Eck. 2017. A neural representation of sketch drawings. arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.03477(2017).

[16]

Ian Douglas Horswill. 2018. Postmortem: MKULTRA, an experimental AI-based game. In Fourteenth Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference.

[17]

Daniel Jallov, Sebastian Risi, and Julian Togelius. 2016. EvoCommander: A novel game based on evolving and switching between artificial brains. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 9, 2(2016), 181–191.

[18]

Bernard Jansen, Joni Salminen, Soon-gyo Jung, and Kathleen Guan. 2021. Data-driven personas. Synthesis Lectures on Human-Centered Informatics 14, 1(2021), i–317.

[19]

Madeleine Kay and Edward J Powley. 2018. The effect of visualising NPC pathfinding on player exploration. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 1–6.

Digital Library

[20]

Benjamin Kenwright. 2022. Why Player-AI Interaction Research Will Be Critical to the Next Generation of Video Games. (2022).

[21]

Frank Lantz. 2019. Hey Robot. Website. https://everybodyhousegames.com/heyrobot.html

[22]

Chun Fu Lin, Yu-chu Yeh, Yu Hsin Hung, and Ray I Chang. 2013. Data mining for providing a personalized learning path in creativity: An application of decision trees. Computers & Education 68 (2013), 199–210.

[23]

Mathias Löwe, Jennifer Villareale, Evan Freed, Aleksanteri Sladek, Jichen Zhu, and Sebastian Risi. 2021. Dealing with Adversarial Player Strategies in the Neural Network Game iNNk through Ensemble Learning. In The 16th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) 2021. 1–10.

Digital Library

[24]

Neil Maiden. 2008. User requirements and system requirements. IEEE Software 25, 2 (2008), 90–91.

Digital Library

[25]

Michael Mateas. 2003. Expressive AI: Games and Artificial Intelligence. In DiGRA Conference, Vol. 15. Citeseer.

[26]

Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern. 2003. Façade: An experiment in building a fully-realized interactive drama. In Game developers conference, Vol. 2. 4–8.

[27]

Chelsea M Myers, Jiachi Xie, and Jichen Zhu. 2020. A Game-Based Approach for Helping Designers Learn Machine Learning Concepts. arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.05605(2020).

[28]

Sean Penney, Jonathan Dodge, Claudia Hilderbrand, Andrew Anderson, Logan Simpson, and Margaret Burnett. 2018. Toward foraging for understanding of StarCraft agents: An empirical study. In 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. 225–237.

Digital Library

[29]

Sebastian Risi and Julian Togelius. 2015. Neuroevolution in games: State of the art and open challenges. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 9, 1(2015), 25–41.

[30]

Yvonne Rogers, Helen Sharp, and Jenny Preece. 2011. Interaction design: beyond human-computer interaction. John Wiley & Sons.

Digital Library

[31]

Elizabeth B-N Sanders and Pieter Jan Stappers. 2008. Co-creation and the new landscapes of design. Co-design 4, 1 (2008), 5–18.

[32]

Gillian Smith, Alexei Othenin-Girard, Jim Whitehead, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. 2012. PCG-based game design: creating Endless Web. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 188–195.

Digital Library

[33]

Gillian Smith, Jim Whitehead, and Michael Mateas. 2010. Tanagra: A mixed-initiative level design tool. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 209–216.

Digital Library

[34]

Sam Snodgrass and Santiago Ontanón. 2016. Learning to generate video game maps using markov models. IEEE transactions on computational intelligence and AI in games 9, 4(2016), 410–422.

[35]

Marc Steen. 2013. Co-design as a process of joint inquiry and imagination. Design Issues 29, 2 (2013), 16–28.

[36]

Steve Swink. 2008. Game feel: a game designer’s guide to virtual sensation. CRC Press.

[37]

Milka Trajkova. 2020. Designing AI-Based Feedback for Ballet Learning. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–9.

[38]

Mike Treanor, Alexander Zook, Mirjam P Eladhari, Julian Togelius, Gillian Smith, Michael Cook, Tommy Thompson, Brian Magerko, John Levine, and Adam Smith. 2015. AI-based game design patterns. (2015).

[39]

Josep Valls-Vargas, Jichen Zhu, and Santiago Ontañón. 2017. Graph grammar-based controllable generation of puzzles for a learning game about parallel programming. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 1–10.

Digital Library

[40]

Jennifer Villareale, Ana V Acosta-Ruiz, Samuel Adam Arcaro, Thomas Fox, Evan Freed, Robert C Gray, Mathias Löwe, Panote Nuchprayoon, Aleksanteri Sladek, Rush Weigelt, 2020. iNNk: A Multi-Player Game to Deceive a Neural Network. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. 33–37.

Digital Library

[41]

Jennifer Villareale, Robert C Gray, Anushay Furqan, Thomas Fox, and Jichen Zhu. 2019. Enhancing social exergames through idle game design. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 1–5.

Digital Library

[42]

Jennifer Villareale, Casper Harteveld, and Jichen Zhu. 2022. " I Want To See How Smart This AI Really Is": Player Mental Model Development of an Adversarial AI Player. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6, CHI PLAY(2022), 1–26.

Digital Library

[43]

Jennifer Villareale and Jichen Zhu. 2021. Understanding Mental Models of AI through Player-AI Interaction. arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.16168(2021).

[44]

Georgios N Yannakakis and Julian Togelius. 2018. Artificial intelligence and games. Vol. 2. Springer.

[45]

Nick Yee. 2006. Motivations for play in online games. CyberPsychology & behavior 9, 6 (2006), 772–775.

[46]

R Michael Young, Mark O Riedl, Mark Branly, Arnav Jhala, RJ Martin, and CJ Saretto. 2004. An architecture for integrating plan-based behavior generation with interactive game environments.J. Game Dev. 1, 1 (2004), 1–29.

[47]

Jichen Zhu, Diane H Dallal, Robert C Gray, Jennifer Villareale, Santiago Ontañón, Evan M Forman, and Danielle Arigo. 2021. Personalization paradox in behavior change apps: Lessons from a social comparison-based personalized app for physical activity. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CSCW1(2021), 1–21.

Digital Library

[48]

Jichen Zhu and Magy Seif El-Nasr. 2021. Open player modeling: Empowering players through data transparency. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.05810(2021).

[49]

Jichen Zhu, Antonios Liapis, Sebastian Risi, Rafael Bidarra, and G Michael Youngblood. 2018. Explainable AI for designers: A human-centered perspective on mixed-initiative co-creation. In 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG). IEEE, 1–8.

Digital Library

[50]

Jichen Zhu and Santiago Ontanón. 2010. Towards Analogy-Based Story Generation. In ICCC. Citeseer, 75–84.

[51]

Jichen Zhu and Santiago Ontañón. 2020. Player-centered AI for automatic game personalization: Open problems. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. 1–8.

Digital Library

[52]

Jichen Zhu, Jennifer Villareale, Nithesh Javvaji, Sebastian Risi, Mathias Löwe, Rush Weigelt, and Casper Harteveld. 2021. Player-AI interaction: What neural network games reveal about AI as play. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–17.

Digital Library

Cited By

Maram SKleinman EVillareale JZhu JSeif El-Nasr M(2024)"Ah! I see" - Facilitating Process Reflection in Gameplay through a Novel Spatio-Temporal Visualization SystemProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642484(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642484
Maram SVillareale JFox TZhu JEl-Nasr M(2023)Parallel OPM: A Visualization System for Analyzing Peers Board States for Gameplay Reflection2023 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)10.1109/CoG57401.2023.10333145(1-2)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CoG57401.2023.10333145

Recommendations

The Spheres of Player Motivation: Understanding Players of Digital Games
CHI PLAY '22: Extended Abstracts of the 2022 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play

Understanding player motivations is crucial for the games industry, as it empowers developers to improve how their games are designed. Each player is different and possesses their own motivations to play. Motivations can vary greatly, ranging from ...
WEARPG: game design implications for movement-based play in table-top role-playing games with arm-worn devices
AcademicMindtrek '16: Proceedings of the 20th International Academic Mindtrek Conference

Combining the physical and the digital is one of the most trending topics in game research in HCI. Augmenting the table-top role-playing games (TTRPG) by adding electronic devices is a growing research area, yet the introduction of new play styles is ...
Enemy NPC design patterns in shooter games
DPG '12: Proceedings of the First Workshop on Design Patterns in Games

Gameplay in single-player shooter games primarily consists of combat with Non-player Characters (NPCs). However, there has been little research done to study how enemy NPCs affect player behavior in shooter games. As a consequence, there is no formal ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

FDG '23: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

April 2023

621 pages

ISBN:9781450398558

DOI:10.1145/3582437

Editors:
Phil Lopes
Lusófona University
,
Filipe Luz
Lusófona University
,
Antonios Liapis
University of Malta
,
Henrik Engström
University of Skövde

Copyright © 2023 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 12 April 2023

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation
Danish Novo Nordisk Foundation

Conference

FDG 2023

FDG 2023: Foundations of Digital Games 2023

April 12 - 14, 2023

Lisbon, Portugal

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

2
Total Citations
View Citations
533
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)397
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)43

Reflects downloads up to 30 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Maram SKleinman EVillareale JZhu JSeif El-Nasr M(2024)"Ah! I see" - Facilitating Process Reflection in Gameplay through a Novel Spatio-Temporal Visualization SystemProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642484(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642484
Maram SVillareale JFox TZhu JEl-Nasr M(2023)Parallel OPM: A Visualization System for Analyzing Peers Board States for Gameplay Reflection2023 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)10.1109/CoG57401.2023.10333145(1-2)Online publication date: 21-Aug-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/CoG57401.2023.10333145

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten