Player Experience and Deceptive Expectations of Difficulty Adaptation in Digital Games

Increasingly, digital games are including adaptive features that adjust the level of diculty to match the skills of individual players. The intention is to improve and prolong the player experience by allowing the player to have the feeling of challenge without it being overwhelming and leading to repeated failure and frustration. Previous work has shown that player experience is indeed improved by such adaptations but also that the player experience can be improved also by simply claiming such an adaptation is present even when it is not. It is therefore possible that claims about adaptations and the actual adaptations could interact and not lead to the intended outcomes for the players or worse disappoint players. This paper reports on two studies that were conducted to experimentally investigate the interaction between game adaptations and player information about adaptations on the player experience, specically their sense of immersion in the game. For this, two games were developed using two dierent kinds of adaptations to adjust diculty based on players' performance in the game. Participants were provided with information about game adaptations independently of whether the adaptations were present. The results suggest that players felt more immersed in the game when told that the game adapts to them, regardless of whether the adaptation was present in the game or not. This eect was observed in both games despite their dierent adaptations and it remained prominent even during longer gaming sessions. These ndings demonstrate that players' knowledge of adaptations in uences their experience independently of adaptations. In this particular context, the knowledge reinforced the experience of the adaptations. This suggests that, at least in some circumstances, developers do not need to be concerned about negative eects of telling players about in-game adaptations.