| dc.description.abstract | Regular physical activity has many health benefits, including preventing car- diovascular disease and other conditions linked to obesity. However, people often lose motivation to incorporate sports into their lives over time. Exergames, which combine physical activity with games, have the potential to motivate people to do physical activities. In particular, multiplayer games can be motivating due to their competitive nature and by connecting friends remotely.
However, one issue remains: differing skills among players can lead to frustra- tion or boredom, particularly when skill levels vary significantly. As a solution, this thesis proposes dynamically adapting the difficulty of the game during game play for players individually.
Previous research on balancing exergames has identified negative effects, such as overbalancing or a detrimental impact on the self-efficacy of weaker players. To address these issues and develop an approach for dynamic difficulty adaptation aligned with players’ needs, the research question for this thesis is formulated as follows: How can dynamic difficulty adaptation be used to balance mismatched skills among multiple players? To achieve this, it was essential to engage users in the design process, which led to several ideas created according to requirements for dynamic difficulty adaptation, which have been derived from preliminary focus groups. A prototype was then developed which incorporated dynamic difficulty adaptation in a game similar to the Virtual Reality game Beat Saber.
The second part of the thesis involved an empirical cycle to investigate effects on perceived fairness, competence, and motivation. User experiments were con- ducted with 14 participant pairs playing against each other in a within-subjects study. Results of the quantitative analysis revealed that fairness was significantly higher for the game with dynamic difficulty adaptation, confirming one of the hypotheses. However, no differences were found for competence and motivation. Qualitative analysis of the interviews showed that participants felt motivated dur- ing the game with the adaptation approach, mainly because they could change the game’s results at any point with more effort. Additionally, no overbalancing occurred and participants did not feel less competent due to receiving help during the game. However, some participants still prefer to compete in games without difficulty adaptation to compare true skills. The aforementioned design require- ments were compared with the user study results and have mostly led to positive results. However, it is unclear if the same requirements hold true in other types of exergames. Particularly, focusing on creating close games and letting players control the received assistance led to the positive result of higher fairness. Future research can focus on applying these requirements in other contexts and examin- ing long-term effects on motivation when using dyanmic difficulty adaptation. | |
