Creating Customized Game Experiences by Leveraging Human Creative Effort: A Planning Approach

The task of entertaining people has, until very recently, been the exclusive domain of humans. However, recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) suggest that intelligent systems may be used to create dynamic and engaging real-time entertainment experiences. In this paper we consider a novel technique called Experience Adaptation. Experience Adaptation is an offline process that leverages human creative ability by taking human-authored specifications of desired user experiences and autonomously "re-writing" them based on unique requirements of individual users. In this chapter, we illustrate Experience Adaptation in the context of computer-based role-playing games in which player experience is highly dependent on an unfolding plotline. Our approach uses a plan refinement technique based on partial-order planning to (a) optimize the global structure of the plotline according to input from a player model, (b) maintain plotline coherence, and (c) facilitate authorial intent by preserving as much of the original plotline as possible.

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