Performance Assessment in Serious Games
In every digital game, players both act in and interact with the game. They use the options of game mechanics to achieve goals. For example, players move a controller to steer the motions of an avatar, or they press buttons to trigger certain actions. The
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Josef Wiemeyer, Michael Kickmeier-Rust and Christina M. Steiner
Abstract
In every digital game, players both act in and interact with the game. They use the options of game mechanics to achieve goals. For example, players move a controller to steer the motions of an avatar, or they press buttons to trigger certain actions. These actions and interactions lead to certain results like a successful finish of a quest, solving a problem, or increasing a score. Both the quality and results of actions and interactions are subsumed under the term performance. Assessment of player performance is required for several purposes, for example for in-game or online adaptation and for offline evaluation. This chapter addresses the issue of performance assessment in serious games. Performance is a complex concept comprising results and processes of actions and interactions of the players in and with the game. First, generic and domain-specific models of performance are introduced to illustrate the variety of approaches. Based on this knowledge, online and offline assessments of performance are discussed. Finally, the integration of online and offline performance assessment into the process of game adaptation is described.
10.1
Introduction
Imagine playing an educational serious game in physics where you try to solve tasks according to various quests. You take action and realize that you are unable to solve the tasks. Even worse, you do not get any hints or instructions to guide you to J. Wiemeyer (&) Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany e-mail: [email protected] M. Kickmeier-Rust C.M. Steiner Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 R. Dörner et al. (eds.), Serious Games, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40612-1_10
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the solution. As a consequence, you feel angry or even disappointed. Further, imagine making progress in the game (after spending a long, hard time gaming). With increasing expertise, the tasks offered by the game may become very easy to solve. Therefore, you get increasingly bored. Obviously, the game does not offer tasks that are balanced enough—in the sense of establishing optimal difficulty according to your current competence and mood state—to challenge you. The game could have done much better if your current performance had been assessed continuously in order to use this information for appropriate adaptation and personalization. Perhaps the game would have realized your specific problem with a missing competence component, e.g., lacking knowledge about refraction. Furthermore, the game could have also determined your personal learning styles or preferences, and adapted the offered information accordingly. Performance assessment in serious games is important for several reasons (see also Bellotti et al. 2013). First, as illustrated by the previous example, to maintain player experience and keep the players within the corridor of game flow the game has to be adaptive considering the current performance o
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