Guillaume Levieux

Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers | CNAM · Centre d'Etudes et De Recherche en Informatique et Communications (CEDRIC)

This paper describes our research investigating the perception of difficulty in video games, defined as players’ estimation of their chances of failure. We discuss our approach as it relates to psychophysical studies of subjective difficulty and to cognitive psychology research into the overconfidence effect. The starting point for our study was th...

This paper synthetically presents a reliable and generic way to evaluate the difficulty of video games, and an experiment testing its accuracy and concordance with subjective assessments of difficulty. We propose a way to split the gameplay into measurable items, and to take into account the player's apprenticeship to statistically evaluate the gam...

In this paper, we study the link between difficulty and player's motivation in two games developed by Ubisoft®: Rayman®Legends and Tom Clancy's The Division®. We describe a method to estimate players' difficulty over time and link it's time varying effect with players retention. Results confirm flow and self-efficacy theory. Also, for the first hou...

In this paper, we discuss the interest and the need to evaluate the difficulty of single player video games. We first show the importance of difficulty, drawing from semiotics to explain the link between tension-resolution cycles and challenge with the player’s enjoyment. Then, we report related work on automatic gameplay analysis. We show through...

Motivation Protein–protein docking aims at predicting the geometry of protein interactions to gain insights into the mechanisms underlying these processes and develop new strategies for drug discovery. Interactive and user-oriented manipulation tools can support this task complementary to automated software. Results This article presents an intera...

This paper describes an automated evaluation of the overall game experience using a synthetic agent, that we contextualize for First-Person Shooter games. This evaluation method is based on the characterization of the game experience through dynamics of major FPS games. We define dynamics as sequences of events that are meaningful for the player du...

Challenge, and thus difficulty, is one of the main factors of enjoyment and motivation in video games. To enhance the players’ motivation, many studies rely on Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment model in order to follow a difficulty curve. However, few authors worked on the shape of the difficulty curve itself. Our goal in this paper is to evaluate how...

Ce rapport décrit les problématiques de conception relatives à la variabilité de l’expérience de jeu, et en particulier comment la perception de la variabilité permet de garder un joueur motivé d’une session de jeu à une autre. L’approche décrite dans ce document concerne la perception de la variabilité à l’échelle de l’architecture d’un niveau, et...

This paper presents Genetic-WFC, a procedural level generation algorithm that mixes genetic optimization with Wave Function Collapse, a local adjacency constraints propagation algorithm. We use a synthetic player to evaluate the novelty, safety and complexity of the generated levels. Novelty is maximized when the synthetic player goes on tiles not...

Difficulty is a fundamental factor of enjoyment and motivation in video games. Thus, many video games use Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment systems to provide players with an optimal level of challenge. However, many of these systems are either game specific, limited to a specific range of difficulties, or require much more data than one can track duri...

Difficulty is one of the major motivational pull of video games, and thus many games use Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) systems to improve the game experience. This paper describes our research investigating the influence of DDA systems on player's confidence, evaluated using an in-game bet system. Our hypothesis is that DDA systems may lead p...

The large number of protein structures deposited in the protein database provide an opportunity to examine the structure relations using computational algorithms, which can be used to classify the structures based on shape similarity. In this paper, we report the result of the SHREC 2017 track on shape retrievals from protein database. The goal of...

One of the most problematic issues in healthcare is the patient's lack of adherence to the therapy. Patients' motivation is indeed hard to maintain when they have to execute repetitive, boring or tedious exercises. In such cases, they tend to practice less regularly and even to entirely give up the therapeutic protocol. Fortunately, therapeutic exe...

In the present work, we describe and discuss two interactive visual-ization techniques recently added to the Udock software. First, we propose to display a spherical projection of the protein's molecular surface properties. The resulting 2D map allows to get in one glance a global view of the protein. Second, we propose to let the user choose a spe...

Protein-protein interactions play a crucial role in biological processes. Protein docking calculations' goal is to predict, given two proteins of known structures, the associate conformation of the corresponding complex. Here, we present a new interactive protein docking system, Udock, that makes use of users' cognitive capabilities added up. In Ud...

In this paper, we present a collaborative game designed for Sifteo Cubes, a new tangible interface for multiplayer games. We discuss how this game exploits the platform's interface to transfer some of the game mechanics into the non-digital world, and how this approach affects both the player's experience and the design process. We present the tech...

This paper is a first step toward the exploration and further development of the narrative possibilities offered by emergent games. First, we present the five characteristics of emergent narratives that we believe to be fundamental: coherence, agency, possibility space, uncertainty and coauthoring. Then, we investigate the presence of these charact...

In this paper, we present a new model to analyse therapeutic games. The goal of the model is to describe and analyse the relations between the three aspects of a therapeutic game: the player, the game, and the therapy. The model is intended to game designers. It is a tool to improve the communication between health experts and game designers, and t...

This paper presents a way to dynamically influence the shape and movements of a simulated crowd. We propose a tool and system that allows to modify a crowd?s dynamics in an intuitive, semantically rich and out of context fashion, while being independent from the global path finding architecture and having a low computational cost. We follow a mixed...

The goal of this thesis is to propose a general and measurable definition of the difficulty in video games. The current approach, widely adopted, is mainly heuristic, and depends on each game's context. We propose a generic way to analyse a gameplay, taking into account the player's apprenticeship, which allows to statistically evaluate the gamepla...

Présentation d'un modèle d'évaluation de la difficulté d'un gameplay ainsi que des résultats d'une expérimentation de ce modèle.

In this this paper, we discuss the interest and the need to evaluate the difficulty of single player video games. We first show the importance of difficulty, drawing from semiotics to explain the link be-tween tension-resolution cycles, and challenge with the player's enjoy-ment. Then, we report related work on automatic gameplay analysis. We show...

This paper describes the DEEP project (Dialogs taking into account Experience, Emotions and Personality, adapted to computer games), which started in June 2006. The aim of the project is to provide generic solutions for the integration of autonomous Non Player Characters (NPCs) in next-generation adventure games. DEEP NPCs, equipped with a personal...

This paper describes the DEEP project (Dialogs taking into account Experience, Emotions and Personality, adapted to computer games), which started in June 2006. The aim of the project is to provide generic solutions for the integration of autonomous Non Player Characters (NPCs) in next-generation adventure games. DEEP NPCs, equipped with a personal...