skip to main content
10.1145/3025453.3025721acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PageschiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

"Not another Z piece!": Adaptive Difficulty in TETRIS

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Difficulty in TETRIS is adjusted by adapting the speed with which blocks fall. In this contribution, we describe results of an exploratory study in which we investigated relationships between players' performance and their subjective assessment of difficulty and fun. We tested five different algorithms that, instead of adjusting game speed, adjust difficulty by choosing blocks based on the current game state. With our results, we establish pile height and bumpiness as parameters that indicate the performance of a player during a live game, discuss the inherent difficulty of different block choosing algorithms and show how the relationship between fun and perceived difficulty varies for distinct player groups. With regard to adapting difficulty, we argue that one can still teach an old dog such a TETRIS a lot of new tricks.

References

[1]
Sami Abuhamdeh and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. 2012. The Importance of Challenge for the Enjoyment of Intrinsically Motivated, Goal-Directed Activities. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38, 3 (2012), 317--330.
[2]
Richard Bartle. 1996. Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades: Players who suit MUDs. Journal of MUD research 1, 1 (1996), 19.
[3]
Sven Bertel. 2014. Individual Cognitive Abilities and Styles in HCI: Three Main Challenges and a Tiered Adaption Model. In HCI Engineering 2014: Charting the Way towards Methods and Tools for Advanced Interactive Systems. Workshop at the 6th ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA.
[4]
Niko Böhm, Gabriella Kókai, and Stefan Mandl. 2005. An Evolutionary Approach to Tetris. In 6th Metaheuristics International Conference (6th Metaheuristics International Conference Wien August 22--26, 2005). MIC'05, Vienna, Austria, 1--6.
[5]
Heidi Burgiel. 1997. How to Lose at Tetris. Mathematical Gazette 81 (1997), 194--200.
[6]
Guillaume Chanel, Cyril Rebetez, Mireille Bétrancourt, and Thierry Pun. 2008. Boredom, Engagement and Anxiety As Indicators for Adaptation to Difficulty in Games. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Entertainment and Media in the Ubiquitous Era (MindTrek '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13--17.
[7]
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. 1991. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Vol. 41. HarperPerennial, New York, NY, USA.
[8]
Erik D Demaine, Susan Hohenberger, and David Liben-Nowell. 2003. Tetris is Hard, Even to Approximate. In Computing and Combinatorics. Springer, Heidelberg, Germany, 351--363.
[9]
Colin Fahey. 2012. Tetris. (July 2012). http://colinfahey.com/tetris/tetris.html
[10]
Landon Flom and Cliff Robinson. 2005. Using a Genetic Algorithm to Weight an Evaluation Function for Tetris. (2005).
[11]
Robin Hunicke. 2005. The Case for Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment in Games. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE '05). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 429--433.
[12]
Wijnand IJsselsteijn, Karolien Poels, and Yvonne De Kort. 2008. The Game Experience Questionnaire: Development of a self-report measure to assess player experiences of digital games. (2008).
[13]
Mitu Khandaker. 2011. Column: "Gambrian Explosion": Games, Randomness, and The Problem with Being Human. (April 2011). http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/04/column_gambrian_explosion_game.php
[14]
David Kirsh and Paul Maglio. 1992. Reaction and Reflection in Tetris. In Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems: Proceedings of the First Annual International Conference (AIPS92. Morgan Kaufman.
[15]
Robert Ladouceur, Anne Gaboury, Annie Bujold, Nadine Lachance, and Sarah Tremblay. 1991. Ecological Validity of Laboratory Studies of Videopoker Gaming. Journal of Gambling Studies 7, 2 (1991), 109--116.
[16]
John Lindstedt and Wayne Gray. 2013. Extreme Expertise: Exploring Expert Behavior in Tetris. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Cooperative Minds: Social Interaction and Group Dynamics). Cognitive Science Society, Berlin, Germany, 912--917.
[17]
Derek Lomas, Kishan Patel, Jodi L. Forlizzi, and Kenneth R. Koedinger. 2013. Optimizing Challenge in an Educational Game Using Large-scale Design Experiments. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 89--98.
[18]
Ricardo Lopes and Rafael Bidarra. 2011. Adaptivity Challenges in Games and Simulations: A Survey. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games 3, 2 (June 2011), 85--99.
[19]
Brian Magerko, Carrie Heeter, Joe Fitzgerald, and Ben Medler. 2008. Intelligent Adaptation of Digital Game-based Learning. In Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Future Play: Research, Play, Share (Future Play '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 200--203.
[20]
Frederico Poloni. 2012. Notes on the Bastet Algorithm. (January 2012). http://fph.altervista.org/prog/bastetalgo.html
[21]
Hua Qin, Pei-Luen Patrick Rau, and Gavriel Salvendy. 2010. Effects of different scenarios of game difficulty on player immersion. Interacting with Computers 22, 3 (2010), 230--239.
[22]
Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan. 2007. The player experience of need satisfaction (PENS) model. Immersyve Inc. (2007).
[23]
Elad Shahar and Ross West. 2010. Evolutionary AI for Tetris. (2010). http://www.cs.uml.edu/ecg/pub/uploads/AIfall10/eshahar_rwest_GATetris.pdf
[24]
David Sheff. 1993. Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children. Random House Inc., New York, NY, USA.
[25]
Stefanie Wetzel, Katta Spiel, and Sven Bertel. 2014. Dynamically Adapting an AI Game Engine Based on Players' Eye Movements and Strategies. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGCHI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3--12.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)How fast can we play Tetris greedily with rectangular pieces?Theoretical Computer Science10.1016/j.tcs.2024.114405992:COnline publication date: 21-Apr-2024
  • (2023)The Placebo Effect of Artificial Intelligence in Human–Computer InteractionACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/352922529:6(1-32)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
  • (2022) Measuring Control to Dynamically Induce Flow in Tetris IEEE Transactions on Games10.1109/TG.2022.318290114:4(579-588)Online publication date: Dec-2022
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2017
7138 pages
ISBN:9781450346559
DOI:10.1145/3025453
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 May 2017

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Badges

  • Honorable Mention

Author Tags

  1. fun
  2. perceived difficulty
  3. tetris
  4. user study

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

CHI '17
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

CHI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 600 of 2,400 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Upcoming Conference

CHI 2025
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 26 - May 1, 2025
Yokohama , Japan

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)47
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
Reflects downloads up to 13 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)How fast can we play Tetris greedily with rectangular pieces?Theoretical Computer Science10.1016/j.tcs.2024.114405992:COnline publication date: 21-Apr-2024
  • (2023)The Placebo Effect of Artificial Intelligence in Human–Computer InteractionACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/352922529:6(1-32)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2023
  • (2022) Measuring Control to Dynamically Induce Flow in Tetris IEEE Transactions on Games10.1109/TG.2022.318290114:4(579-588)Online publication date: Dec-2022
  • (2022)Playstyles in Tetris: Beyond Player Skill, Score, and CompetitionEntertainment Computing – ICEC 202210.1007/978-3-031-20212-4_13(162-170)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2022
  • (2021)Dynamic Manipulation of Player Performance with Music Tempo in TetrisProceedings of the 26th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces10.1145/3397481.3450684(290-296)Online publication date: 14-Apr-2021
  • (2019)Adapting Gameplay to Eye Movements - An Exploration with TETRISExtended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts10.1145/3341215.3356267(687-695)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2019
  • (2019)Goal-based progression synthesis in a korean learning gameProceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3337722.3337745(1-9)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2019
  • (2019)Characteristics Study of Dance-charts on Rhythm-based Video Games2019 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG)10.1109/CIG.2019.8848126(1-4)Online publication date: 20-Aug-2019
  • (2019)Virtual titration laboratory experiment with differentiated instructionComputer Animation and Virtual Worlds10.1002/cav.188230:3-4Online publication date: 22-May-2019
  • (2017)Comparing Effects of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment Systems on Video Game ExperienceProceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3116595.3116623(317-327)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2017

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media