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Data-Driven Approaches to Game Player Modeling: A Systematic Literature Review

Published: 03 January 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Modeling and predicting player behavior is of the utmost importance in developing games. Experience has proven that, while theory-driven approaches are able to comprehend and justify a model's choices, such models frequently fail to encompass necessary features because of a lack of insight of the model builders. In contrast, data-driven approaches rely much less on expertise, and thus offer certain potential advantages. Hence, this study conducts a systematic review of the extant research on data-driven approaches to game player modeling. To this end, we have assessed experimental studies of such approaches over a nine-year period, from 2008 to 2016; this survey yielded 46 research studies of significance. We found that these studies pertained to three main areas of focus concerning the uses of data-driven approaches in game player modeling. One research area involved the objectives of data-driven approaches in game player modeling: behavior modeling and goal recognition. Another concerned methods: classification, clustering, regression, and evolutionary algorithm. The third was comprised of the current challenges and promising research directions for data-driven approaches in game player modeling.

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Published In

cover image ACM Computing Surveys
ACM Computing Surveys  Volume 50, Issue 6
November 2018
752 pages
ISSN:0360-0300
EISSN:1557-7341
DOI:10.1145/3161158
  • Editor:
  • Sartaj Sahni
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 03 January 2018
Accepted: 01 September 2017
Revised: 01 May 2017
Received: 01 October 2016
Published in CSUR Volume 50, Issue 6

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Author Tags

  1. Game player modeling
  2. computational models
  3. data-driven approaches
  4. systematic literature review (SLR)

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  • Survey
  • Research
  • Refereed

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  • National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP)

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