Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment via Fast User Adaptation

Abstract: Dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) is a technology that adapts a game's challenge to match the player's skill. It is a key element in game development that provides continuous motivation and immersion to the player. However, conventional DDA methods require tuning in-game parameters to generate the levels for various players. Recent DDA approaches based on deep learning can shorten the time-consuming tuning process, but require sufficient user demo data for adaptation. In this paper, we present a fast user adaptation method that can adjust the difficulty of the game for various players using only a small amount of demo data by applying a meta-learning algorithm. In the video game environment user test (n=9), our proposed DDA method outperformed a typical deep learning-based baseline method.