Holiday Knight: a Videogame with Skill-based Challenge Generation

Challenges in video games tend to be created in a ’one challenge for all players’ fashion, which creates different experiences for different players given that they do not all possess the same skills required to overcome said challenges. Some games offer the choice between a few difficulty settings like the well known easy, normal and hard format. But what if instead of one difficulty for everyone or making the player choose the difficulty he wants, the game could adjust its challenges to suit each player in a way that would make the experience felt by all players similar? Based on a previous work that proved that, for the game used, such a model increased both time spent playing and number of times the game was replayed, when comparing an adaptive model with a conventional way of creating challenges, the work presented in this document investigated how the adaptation of the challenges affected the experience of the player where both versions of the game used the same method to create the challenges, but where one of them would adapt the challenges to the player and the other would not. The conclusions were that there was no significant difference in time played nor in how many times the game was replayed, but the challenge felt by the players of the adaptive version was more homogeneous, meaning the challenge felt by testers was very similar, and that no loss of competence was felt by these players when compared to the non-adaptive version.