Classifying Players For Unique Game Experiences

togelius writes "Whenever you play a game of Tomb Raider: Underworld, heaps of data about your playing style is collected at Eidos' servers. Researchers at the Center for Computer Games Research have now mined this data to identify the different types of player behavior (PDF). Using self-organizing neural networks, they classified players as either Veterans, Solvers, Pacifists or Runners. It turns out people play the game for very different reasons and focus on different parts of the game, but almost everyone falls into one of these categories. These neural networks can now quickly determine which of these groups you belong to based on just seeing you play. In the near future, such networks will be used to adapt games like Tomb Raider while they are played (e.g. by removing or adding puzzles and enemies), so you get the game you want."

Comments

The four types

[nschubach]

In case anyone else was trying to figure out these roles... (page 6 last two paragraphs - > page 7)

Veterans = The power gamers, deaths usually only environmental.

Solvers = Die often (mainly from falling), methodical, slow.

Pacifists = Cannon fodder basically.

Runners = They run, they die, they run. The first thing that comes to mind here is a player that goes for the flag immediately in CTF.

Re:The four types

[andrewd18]

Slightly more detailed breakdown with quotes from TFA:

8.6% of players were Veterans, "players that die very few times; their death is caused mainly by the environment and they complete TRU very fast."

22.12% of players were Solvers. "Their long completion times, low number of deaths by enemies or environment effects indicate a slow-moving, careful style of play with the number one cause of death being falling (jumping). ... Solvers are excellent at solving puzzles, respond readily to moveable threats but die often from falling and are slow to complete the game."

46.18% of players were Pacifists: "The total number of their deaths varies a lot but their completion times are below average and their help requests are minimal indicating a certain amount of skill at playing the game. ... the Pacifists are experts in terms of navigation and move rapidly through the virtual environment, but also respond badly to threats that are moveable or unexpected"

16.56% of players were Runners, "players that die quite often and mainly by opponents and the environment. These players are very fast in completing the game (similar to the Veterans), while having a varying number of help requests which cover the majority of the H value range."

Re:Almost everyone?

[jtogel]

The categories did not exist prior to the data; they were found by unsupervised learning algorithms in the data.

Re:Almost everyone?

[Sockatume]

The system discovers the categories. The analysis finds groupings of players who behave in similar ways through the game, and the researchers named those after-the-fact. There's no a priori reason why the players should group at all, though - the study could've equally found that only a small percentage of players clustered and the majority were radically different from each other.

Re:Bartle did this work already

[am 2k]

Here. But you could have found that yourself on Wikipedia...