Artificial Intelligence and Personalization Opportunities for Serious Games

Effectiveness of Serious Games (SG) depends very much on their capacity to provide the right balance between gaming and educational experience. This requirement raises challenges regarding realization of their intelligence and personalization. We aim to overcome the problems of research fragmentation and identify some of the main issues by presenting a summary of relevant contributions from Artificial Intelligence and Personalization, together with a discussion on their future directions. In this paper, we summarize approaches to user and learning goals modeling, user engagement, various levels of game adaptation, how new sensors and mobile technology can better identify the context of the user, content adaptation and reusability. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Personalization are both essential aspects of all games, be they serious or entertainment based. In this research the role of AI and Personalization is however focused upon the context of Serious Games (SG) in particular. A concerted research direction is necessary in this area so as to establish future benchmarks and metrics for the effective use of AI and Personalization in serious games design and will benefit relevant research communities in providing clear goals and focus . While the transition of AI and Personalization approaches from research labs to SG products is clearly needed, this is an impact area where research in labs may have a real benefit and impact upon products and SGs on the market, as markets mature over the next few years. The work presented in this paper is a summary of the current results of an ongoing cooperation between 9 different institutions within a network of 28 research labs and 6 game developers are gathering their efforts to identify the hot topics for AI and Personalization within SG research. We first present our perspective on the main research questions faced Copyright c 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial