Adaptive two-player videogames

This paper presents a strategy to design two-player videogames which are able to adapt themselves to the level of the layers who are playing at each moment. The goal of the strategy is to allow the players enjoying the game in spite of their different levels. A first tennis videogame (based on the classic Pong) which implements this strategy has already been developed and evaluated through user studies. In the paper we first motivate this work and survey related work. Then we describe the general strategy and its application to the case of the tennis videogame. We also present the user studies carried out and analyze the interesting results.

Research highlights
► We present a strategy to design two-player videogames which adapt themselves to the players’ level.
► A first tennis videogame has already been developed and evaluated through user studies.
► Participants felt less frustrated, less bored, more engaged and more inclined to play again when the adaptation mechanisms were added to the videogame.