Video game personalisation techniques: A comprehensive survey

• We provide operational definitions for personalisation of content in video games.
• We offer a classification of the many approaches to personalization.
• We survey all such approaches in more detail.
• We summarise by providing ideas on realworld game projects.

Personalisation is the automatic customisation of content and services based on a prediction of what the user wants. Common examples of personalisation can be found in websites that automatically recommend news items or products based on the similar behaviour of other users. In the video game domain, personalisation involves constructing a system capable of tailoring video game rules and content to suit some aspect of the player, e.g., a player’s gameplay preferences, playing style, or skill level. The result of personalisation is a video game that can adapt to suit individual players while they play in order to more effectively entertain, learn, or communicate. In this paper, we survey the most relevant trends and directions of research in personalisation for computer games, a true multi-disciplinary problem requiring contributions from areas as diverse as artificial and computational intelligence, game studies, psychology, game design, and human–computer interaction.