Personalized adaptive dentist game

Abstract

The goal of this project was to develop a personalized adaptive game for use at the dentist or other dental treatment settings. Before the project started, a prototype game utilising the Unity game engine was alreadyavailable. The game’s purpose is to make dental treatment more comfortable by playing it during the treatment.Our goal for this project was to transform the existing prototype game into a personalized, adaptive versionof the game. The game experience should vary on the type of player who is playing the game, e.g. withrespect to the difficulty. Furthermore, the game should be playable by a very broad audience: from non-gamers to hardcore-gamers, and from young children to the elderly. To achieve this, we developed a game prototype that uses gameplay characteristics of the player to construct a model representing the player using a set of parameters. This player model is used to construct level generation parameters, which in turn are used by a level generator to generate an appropriate level. To determine what techniques were required to build the game, we conducted research on serious gamingand investigated several methods for player modelling and PCG in games. We found that it is important to keep a player engaged during a serious game in order for the game to have an optimal effect. We also discovered that using an event based player model construction method was the best option for this game. Finally, we chose to use a chunk based level generation mechanism to keep the level generation both varied and easy to control. The game has been tested twice. The first time, at a dental practice with patients of a dental hygienist. The patients found that the game was indeed distracting them from the treatment. The second time, the game was tested at the International Festival of Technology (IFoT) in Delft. Around 40 people played the game and most indicated that they enjoyed the game. However, people were divided on whether the game was challenging. We designed a player model and used it to generate suitable level generation parameters. Also, a controllable level generator was created to facilitate the adaptive experience. The system structure is flexible and allows easy addition, deletion, or modification of system components.