The rapid iteration and frequent updates of modern video games pose significant challenges to the efficiency and specificity of testing. Although automated playtesting methods based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise, they often lack structured knowledge accumulation mechanisms, making it difficult to conduct precise and efficient testing tailored for incremental game updates. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a KLPEG framework. The framework constructs and maintains a Knowledge Graph (KG) to systematically model game elements, task dependencies, and causal relationships, enabling knowledge accumulation and reuse across versions. Building on this foundation, the framework utilizes LLMs to parse natural language update logs, identify the scope of impact through multi-hop reasoning on the KG, enabling the generation of update-tailored test cases. Experiments in two representative game environments, Overcooked and Minecraft, demonstrate that KLPEG can more accurately locate functionalities affected by updates and complete tests in fewer steps, significantly improving both playtesting effectiveness and efficiency.

The effectiveness of digital treatments can be measured by requiring patients to self-report their state through applications, however, it can be overwhelming and causes disengagement. We conduct a study to explore the impact of gamification on self-reporting. Our approach involves the creation of a system to assess cognitive load (CL) through the analysis of photoplethysmography (PPG) signals. The data from 11 participants is utilized to train a machine learning model to detect CL. Subsequently, we create two versions of surveys: a gamified and a traditional one. We estimate the CL experienced by other participants (13) while completing surveys. We find that CL detector performance can be enhanced via pre-training on stress detection tasks. For 10 out of 13 participants, a personalized CL detector can achieve an F1 score above 0.7. We find no difference between the gamified and non-gamified surveys in terms of CL but participants prefer the gamified version.

Late last year, we told you about the Chungus 2, a virtual computer that was "built" within the blocky world of Minecraft. The initial processor design could play super-basic games like Snake on a 32 32 display. Minecraft builder Sammyuri and their team have been expanding the enormous project. Now, the virtual computer is powerful enough to play…Minecraft. Surprisingly, this hasn't opened any black holes or portals to the netherworld, at least not that we know of.

Alex Migitko started playing tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) 15 years ago. But as life got more demanding, he couldn't commit to the time needed for preparation and play, both as a game facilitator and player. Though passionate about gaming, he ultimately stopped. These "aging out" stories are all too common. Players fall in love with gaming because it provides such depth and breadth of creativity and escape.

Personalized gamification explores knowledge about the users to tailor gamification designs to improve one-size-fits-all gamification. The tailoring process should simultaneously consider user and contextual characteristics (e.g., activity to be done and geographic location), which leads to several occasions to tailor. Consequently, tools for automating gamification personalization are needed. The problems that emerge are that which of those characteristics are relevant and how to do such tailoring are open questions, and that the required automating tools are lacking. We tackled these problems in two steps. First, we conducted an exploratory study, collecting participants' opinions on the game elements they consider the most useful for different learning activity types (LAT) via survey. Then, we modeled opinions through conditional decision trees to address the aforementioned tailoring process. Second, as a product from the first step, we implemented a recommender system that suggests personalized gamification designs (which game elements to use), addressing the problem of automating gamification personalization. Our findings i) present empirical evidence that LAT, geographic locations, and other user characteristics affect users' preferences, ii) enable defining gamification designs tailored to user and contextual features simultaneously, and iii) provide technological aid for those interested in designing personalized gamification. The main implications are that demographics, game-related characteristics, geographic location, and LAT to be done, as well as the interaction between different kinds of information (user and contextual characteristics), should be considered in defining gamification designs and that personalizing gamification designs can be improved with aid from our recommender system.

Procedurally generating cohesive and interesting game environments is challenging and time-consuming. In order for the relationships between the game elements to be natural, common-sense has to be encoded into arrangement of the elements. In this work, we investigate a machine learning approach for world creation using content from the multi-player text adventure game environment LIGHT. We introduce neural network based models to compositionally arrange locations, characters, and objects into a coherent whole. In addition to creating worlds based on existing elements, our models can generate new game content. Humans can also leverage our models to interactively aid in worldbuilding. We show that the game environments created with our approach are cohesive, diverse, and preferred by human evaluators compared to other machine learning based world construction algorithms.

Game development is a complex task involving multiple disciplines and technologies. Developers and researchers alike have suggested that AI-driven game design assistants may improve developer workflow. We present a recommender system for assisting humans in game design as well as a rigorous human subjects study to validate it. The AI-driven game design assistance system suggests game mechanics to designers based on characteristics of the game being developed. We believe this method can bring creative insights and increase users' productivity. We conducted quantitative studies that showed the recommender system increases users' levels of accuracy and computational affect, and decreases their levels of workload.

The ultimate goals of serious education games (SEG) are to facilitate learning and maximizing enjoyment during playing SEGs. In SEG development, there are normally two spaces to be taken into account: knowledge space regarding learning materials and content space regarding games to be used to convey learning materials. How to deploy the learning materials seamlessly and effectively into game content becomes one of the most challenging problems in SEG development. Unlike previous work where experts in education have to be used heavily, we proposed a novel approach that works toward minimizing the efforts of education experts in mapping learning materials to content space. For a proof-of-concept, we apply the proposed approach in developing an SEG game, named \emph{Chem Dungeon}, as a case study in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. This SEG game has been tested with a number of users, and the user survey suggests our method works reasonably well.

Mezzo is a computer program designed that procedurally writes Romantic-Era style music in real-time to accompany computer games. Leitmotivs are associated with game characters and elements, and mapped into various musical forms.  These forms are distinguished by different amounts of harmonic tension and formal regularity, which lets them musically convey various states of markedness which correspond to states in the game story. Because the program is not currently attached to any game or game engine, “virtual” gameplays were been used to explore the capabilities of the program; that is, videos of various game traces were used as proxy examples.  For each game trace, Leitmotivs were input to be associated with characters and game elements, and a set of ‘cues’ was written, consisting of a set of time points at which a new set of game data would be passed to Mezzo to reflect the action of the game trace.  Examples of music composed for one such game trace, a scene from Red Dead Redemption , are given to illustrate the various ways the program maps Leitmotivs into different levels of musical markedness that correspond with the game state.