Game difficulty to change based on emotions?

[Kyng]

https://www.laptopmag.com/news/your-emot...w-it-works

Video game difficulty is a tricky balance to strike, and chances are you’ve been very annoyed at a particular section of a game and given up playing.

Well, scientists at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology have developed a fix to this problem, which employs machine learning to optimize the AI challenge based on your emotional state while playing.

Currently, the game industry has a rudimentary way to tackle this in the form of what's called Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA). This is a fancy way of describing those moments when a game nudges you to change the difficulty level based on your performance.

It’s a fair system, but it does pose some key problems. Namely, it can feel quite demoralizing to have to change the difficulty, because you can’t quite do that one bit where the challenge suddenly spikes.

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Well, I'm a bit unsure on how this would work in practice. On the one hand, they could probably save me a lot of frustration by sneakily lowering the difficulty without me knowing. On the other hand, if I found out that the game had lowered the difficulty for me... then, it'd take away much of the satisfaction of finally beating it.

I think it'd only really work for me if I didn't know that the game was doing this. But I probably would find out, even if I didn't try to .

[Moonface]

This is just a more complex way of doing what certain games have been doing back since at least the 5th Gen. I know the Spyro games have adaptive difficulty (no clue how you change the difficulty in a Spyro game though to be fair) where the game will adjust the difficulty on the fly depending on how well the player is doing, and while not a difficulty change games like The Last of Us will vary the drop rates of materials and ammo depending on the player inventory, so adapting a game to the needs of a player isn't necessarily new as a concept.

[Reyzadren]

Auto anything without my consent is bad (I hate auto-difficulty when I play educational games).

Even auto-brightness.

[SpookyZalost]

Bah, games apparently used to be more difficult.  Instead of lowering the challenge because someone is upset.  They should just practice until they beat the game... That is the point right? The challenge being overcome.

[Moonface]

Bah, games apparently used to be more difficult.  Instead of lowering the challenge because someone is upset.  They should just practice until they beat the game... That is the point right? The challenge being overcome.

The reasons for older games being harder is primarily because of the rental market and arcades. More money could be made by making people spend more money on a game over a longer period of time versus an upfront purchase, and customers wouldn't notice because they mostly saw the smaller immediate short term cost.
Then there's games like Rayman where the developers outright admitted they never tested the game beyond whether it worked or not.

[Lurkerish Allsorts]

Bah, games apparently used to be more difficult.  Instead of lowering the challenge because someone is upset.  They should just practice until they beat the game... That is the point right? The challenge being overcome.

Some people game not to "get gud". Some use it as an escape, to clear their head (and sometimes that means mindless dribble and not trying to think/improve anything), and for other reasons.
Granted I will still mock so called "game media" for not being able to double jump in cup head, or unable to play Doom 2016, and there is a place for games that are just hard for the sake of being hard.
Some games include a "oh if you died so many times at x place, lower (or offer to, which is better IMO as it gives the choice) the difficulty, and if the gamer is kicking butt,raise it back up (again should be a choice).

I'd rather go back to the 90s/00s where you had difficulty choice and built in cheat codes, some of which were more fun then "cheats".

Also I can just see this "AI" being used to exploit gamers to sell micro transactions (Oh looks like you are upset 30 dollars have been charged to you for 15 minutes of rampage mode, drink a MTN Dew™ and recite "Do the Dew™" to continue ).

[SpookyZalost]

Bah, games apparently used to be more difficult.  Instead of lowering the challenge because someone is upset.  They should just practice until they beat the game... That is the point right? The challenge being overcome.

Some people game not to "get gud". Some use it as an escape, to clear their head (and sometimes that means mindless dribble and not trying to think/improve anything), and for other reasons.
Granted I will still mock so called "game media" for not being able to double jump in cup head, or unable to play Doom 2016, and there is a place for games that are just hard for the sake of being hard.
Some games include a "oh if you died so many times at x place, lower (or offer to, which is better IMO as it gives the choice) the difficulty, and if the gamer is kicking butt,raise it back up (again should be a choice).

I'd rather go back to the 90s/00s where you had difficulty choice and built in cheat codes, some of which were more fun then "cheats".

Also I can just see this "AI" being used to exploit gamers to sell micro transactions (Oh looks like you are upset 30 dollars have been charged to you for 15 minutes of rampage mode, drink a MTN Dew™ and recite "Do the Dew™" to continue ).

That's the sucky thing about modern gaming... companies are now getting away with selling an unfinished product and calling it early access.  Companies are using micro transactions more and more instead of giving us a completed game with a bunch of great features not locked behind paywalls.  I too miss the days when you had fun cheat codes... like some of the crazy ones in Carmageddon or Tony Hawk's pro skater 1, 2, and 3.

As for the do the dew bit... Microsoft actually tried that with the Xbox One for it's live TV giving you Xbox live points if while you were watching TV you recited the slogan.

Suffice to say the consumers weren't that stupid and actually did something about it... for once.