Ordering Levels in Human Computation Games using Playtraces and Level Structure

Abstract

Prior work using skill chains for matchmaking-based dynamic difficulty adjustment in human computation games required skill chains to be manually defined for a game, and each level to be manually annotated with the individual skills needed to complete that level. In this work, we present two approaches for defining level orderings for DDA in the platformer HCG Iowa James without using such manually-defined skill chains and annotations. The first involves sequences of action-context pairs found in gameplay traces. The second consists of applying K-means clustering on segments of levels. Our results show that both new approaches outperform baseline random level ordering and perform similarly to the skill chain approach.