Using Multi-Armed Bandits to Dynamically Update Player Models in an Experience Managed Environment

Anton Vinogradov, Brent Harrison

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Players are often considered to be static in their preferred play styles, but this is often untrue. While in most games this is not an issue, in games where experience managers (ExpMs) control the experience, a shift in a player’s preferences can lead to loss of engagement and churn. When an ExpM makes changes to the game world, the game world is now biased in favor of the current player model which will then influence how the ExpM will observe the player’s actions, potentially leading to a biased and incorrect player model. In these situations, it is beneficial for the ExpM to recalculate the player model in an efficient manner. In this paper we show that we can use the techniques used to solve multi-armed bandits along with our own idea of distractions to minimize the time it takes to identify what a player’s preferences are after they change, compensate for the bias of the game world, and to minimize the number of intrusive elements added to the game world. To evaluate these claims, we use a text-only interactive fiction environment specifically created to be experience managed and to exhibit bias. Our experiments show that multi-armed bandit algorithms can quickly recalculate a player model in response to shifts in a player’s preferences compared to several baseline methods.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)207-214
Number of pages8
JournalProceedings - AAAI Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, AIIDE
Volume18
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 11 2022
Event18th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, AIIDE 2022 - Pomona, United States
Duration: Oct 24 2022Oct 28 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2022, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Software

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