Game and Player Feature Selection for Entertainment Capture

The notion of constructing a metric of the degree to which a player enjoys a given game has been presented previously. In this paper, we attempt to construct such metric models of children's 'fun' when playing the Bug Smasher game on the Playware platform. First, a set of numerical features derived from a child's interaction with the Playware hardware is presented. Then the sequential forward selection and the n-best feature selection algorithms are employed together with a function approximator based on an artificial neural network to construct feature sets and function that model the child's notion of 'fun' for this game. Performance of the model is evaluated by the degree to which the preferences predicted by the model match those expressed by the children in a survey experiment. The results show that an effective model can be constructed using these techniques and that the sequential forward selection method performs better in this task than n-best. The model reveals differing preferences for game parameters between children who react fast to game events and those who react slowly. The limitations and the use of the methodology as an effective adaptive mechanism to entertainment augmentation are discussed