Research paper
Hocine, Nadia and Gouaich, Abdelkader
"Therapeutic Games’ Difficulty Adaption: An Approach Based on Player’s Ability and Motivation", Published in the Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Games, pp. 257-261
Link to the abstract: ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=6000349
Objective: the authors set out to describe general principles for therapeutic video games, and to test how the success-to-failure ratio in game play affects motivation.
In traditional therapy, therapists improve the client’s functional skills such as movement using feedback to create a balance between the challenging activity and an reachable goal. Benefits of video games include their motivating and engaging nature: requirements of therapeutic games is that they have measureable outcomes and offer recovery-focused activities to meet rehabilitation goals. This study considers embedding difficulty adjustment into video games, including assessing the client’s ability, and providing variability to minimize boredom.
- Initial evaluation: Video games can provide an initial assessment by requiring the player to go through a series of movements that help create a profile and provide a game starting point and difficulty strategy.
- Variability: The game should be able to operate in a way that separates the therapeutic goals from game play so the therapeutic difficulties and accomplishments can be embedded in different levels of play and in different games.
- Motivation-based difficulty adjustment: This involves disrupting a player’s satisfaction from success at some level of game play. Called “constructive dissatisfaction”, the idea is that this disruption motivates the player to re-seek the satisfaction of successful accomplishment. The authors have created an algorithm that feeds back from motivation and success-to-failure rate to dynamically adjust the game parameters, to both meet the therapy goal of motor skills improvement, and to support the player’s motivation by manipulating the balance between success and failure.
Method: This pilot experiment compares random difficulty adjustment with motivation-based difficulty adjustment for two groups of four able-bodied adults. Hypotheses were i) there will be a difference across conditions for the balance of sucesses to failures and for perceived difficulty. Data included for analysis was the success-to-failure rate in the game session across conditions and the player’s perceived difficulty.
Findings: There is no evidence that motivation-based difficulty adjustment (operating by these authors’ algorithm) is different from randomly generated difficulty adjustment, by the measure of perceived difficulty. Both conditions may contribute to motivation.