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Directly Controlling the Perceived Difficulty of a Shooting Game by the Addition of Fake Enemy Bullets

Published: 08 May 2021 Publication History

Abstract

Adjusting the balance between the player’s game skill and the difficulty level is one of the most important factors to improve the player’s engagement. However, it is still quite rare to find works that aim to straightly control the subjective difficulty perceived by the player. Our research question is whether or not it is possible to control the perceived difficulty just by adding enemy objects that do not raise the actual difficulty level. To investigate this issue, we designed a simple shooting game with two ‘fake enemy bullets’: Unreachable Bullets and Non-collisionable Bullets, which do not damage the player character. The experiment suggests that the non-collisionable bullet can efficiently increase the perceived difficulty level but the unreachable bullet does not. Such a study in novel techniques that can control the perceived difficulty without changing the actual difficulty could contribute to both research and practices in game design.

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References

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Jenova Chen. 2007. Flow in games (and everything else). Commun. ACM 50, 4 (2007), 31–34.
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Daniel Wheat, Martin Masek, Chiou Peng Lam, and Philip Hingston. 2016. Modeling Perceived Difficulty in Game Levels. In Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference (Canberra, Australia) (ACSW ’16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 74, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/2843043.2843478
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Yohei Yanase 2015. Controlling difficulty with player movement prediction in a shooting game. Information Processing Society of Japan 2015, 3 (2015), 1–3.
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Cited By

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  • (2024)Rethinking dynamic difficulty adjustment for video game designEntertainment Computing10.1016/j.entcom.2024.10066350(100663)Online publication date: May-2024
  • (2023)Reducing Objective Difficulty Without Influencing Subjective Difficulty in a Video GameProceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Multimedia in Asia10.1145/3595916.3626361(1-5)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2023

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI EA '21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2021
2965 pages
ISBN:9781450380959
DOI:10.1145/3411763
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Published: 08 May 2021

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  1. Difficulty adjustment
  2. Fixed actual difficulty
  3. Game design
  4. Perceived difficulty

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View all
  • (2024)Rethinking dynamic difficulty adjustment for video game designEntertainment Computing10.1016/j.entcom.2024.10066350(100663)Online publication date: May-2024
  • (2023)Reducing Objective Difficulty Without Influencing Subjective Difficulty in a Video GameProceedings of the 5th ACM International Conference on Multimedia in Asia10.1145/3595916.3626361(1-5)Online publication date: 6-Dec-2023

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