Like PEAS in PoDS: the player, environment, agents, system framework for the personalization of digital systems

Personalization has been explored in the context of games in many forms (e.g., dynamic difficulty adjustment, affective video games, adaptive systems, experience-driven PCG, etc.). The majority of techniques used in these fields have relied on data-driven or manual methods for identifying game components to modify for personalization. We propose a theoretical framework for identifying and categorizing low-level components of games that can be personalized. In this paper we first perform a review of game design frameworks and personalization approaches. We then systematically identify the aspects of games which have been utilized for personalization and which components have been identified in game design frameworks as building blocks of games. We synthesize the identified components into categories of game elements. We then propose PEAS, a theoretical framework for personalization through the adaptation of the Player, Environment, Agents, and System.