ProcDefense — A Game Framework for Procedural Player Skill Training

Abstract

A challenge of game design is in providing affordances to players so that they can learn and improve their skills. Ad- vances in Procedural Content Generation (PCG) suggest this type of game content is a candidate for automatic creation. Some work in PCG has been successful in customizing game difficulty to achieve desired player experience; however, this often involves bringing the difficulty of the game to a level appropriate for the player’s current skills. Players desiring to improve their performance in a particular game may be will- ing to tolerate relatively higher levels of frustration and anx- iety than are targeted in experience-based approaches. As an initial step in this line of inquiry, we introduce ProcDefense, an action game with a modular difficulty control interface, as a platform for future inquiry into the effectiveness of differing PCG techniques for performance-training, dynamic difficulty adjustment.