Procedural Level Generation to Improve a Digital Math Game's Development: Does it Impact Player Experience?

Resumo

Game development is an expensive process that commonly requires a multidisciplinary team. Procedural content generation can remedy some problems of this process, aiding on the creation of different types of contents (e.g. levels). However, few studies have been done in terms of how it influences players, especially on digital math games. This work tackles this problem by investigating how procedural level generation influences players of an introduced digital math game. Besides identifying these influences, we validated the introduced game and analyzed both the relationship between fun, willingness to play the game again (i.e., returnance), and curiosity as well as the impact of demographic and in-game data on player experience and performance. A two-sample experiment was designed where participants played a game version with (dynamic) or without PCG (static) in which in-game (n = 724) and questionnaire (n = 506) data were gathered and empirically analyzed. Mainly, the results demonstrate the experiences of players from the dynamic version were similar to those of the static in all but one question, while being more difficult and providing equivalent engagement. Furthermore, the findings show: the game is fun and arises players curiosity and returnance, players curiosity has a strong correlation to fun and returnance, and demographics and in-game performance impact players experiences. Our results are valuable to developers and designers by showing the impact of procedural level generation on players experiences, as well as how and which factors might play a role in their experiences.