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

Thanks for the heads up

[NervousNerd]

Whenever you play a game of Tomb Raider: Underworld, heaps of data about your playing style is collected at Eidos' servers.

Thanks for the heads up, so I won't buy it. I personally don't like having everything I do monitored in some way on some server with a shady privacy policy.

Re:Thanks for the heads up

[dkleinsc]

I think you guys have the wrong dystopia here: This isn't an Orwellian future that this sort of thing leads to, it's more of a Brave New World with perfectly customized soma for you.

Re:Well I don't think much of this

[Pulse_Instance]

This is them having faith in their designers. The designers are saying that they want the game to be the best for everyone and that if we can learn how people play we can get more people to like the game.