Fuzzy-based dynamic difficulty adjustment of an educational 3D-game

An educational game aims to employ the pleasant and fascinating environment of a game for educational purpose. However, when the game’s educational content or playing environment does not match with the player’s learning needs or game-playing skills, the player can find the game either too easy or too difficult and decide to drop it. Therefore, a successful educational game has to offer Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA) of both the game’s educational content and the game’s playing environment. Considering the above, in this paper a fuzzy-based DDA mechanism of a 3D-game, that teaches the programming language ‘HTML’, is presented. The game adapts dynamically the difficulty of battles and mazes navigation to each individual player’s skills. The novelty of the presented game lies on the application of DDA in the two dimensions (educational content and playing environment) of an educational game and on the use of fuzzy logic for succeeding balance between the game’s difficulty and the user’s playing skills. The adaptation is realized in real-time, during the playing and not each time the player changes game level/track. Furthermore, fuzzy logic allows to apply DDA without the need of many learning data, like other Artificial Intelligence techniques for DDA (i.e. machine learning techniques). The presented game was evaluated through a comparative evaluation, which included questionnaires, an experiment in real conditions and t-test statistical analysis method. The evaluation results showed that the incorporated adaptation mechanism increases the user’s motivation and succeeds to keep players’ interest for the game undiminished.