Providing Adaptive Visual Interface Feedback in Massively Multiplayer Online Games

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games typically feature rich and complex game environments to provide more engaging game-play experiences. The complexity of the underlying system in such games can however result in increased complexity of their interfaces, which may diminish player enjoyment–a major element of players' game experience. Players may customise their in-game interfaces to deal with this type of complexity and hence improve their performance, but the challenges associated with manual interface customisation may prevent some players from effectively personalising their own game interface. In this paper we present an adaptive feedback system with a visual interface component, which dynamically provides the player with a list of predicted actions they are likely to take, in order to simplify the game interface and improve players' game experience. We also report on the outcomes of a user evaluation of this system which demonstrate the potential value of adaptive user interfaces in game design.