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: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.