Experience-Driven Procedural Content Generation

TLDR

Procedural content generation is increasingly important in HCI, with personalization via affective and cognitive modeling and real‑time content adjustment key to effective design across games, Web 2.0, interfaces, and software. The paper presents a taxonomy of PCG algorithms and introduces a framework for PCG driven by computational models of user experience. The authors call this approach Experience‑Driven Procedural Content Generation (EDPCG), a generic method applicable to many HCI subareas. Using games as a rich HCI example, they demonstrate the approach’s effectiveness through several successful studies.

Abstract

Procedural content generation (PCG) is an increasingly important area of technology within modern human-computer interaction (HCI) design. Personalization of user experience via affective and cognitive modeling, coupled with real-time adjustment of the content according to user needs and preferences are important steps toward effective and meaningful PCG. Games, Web 2.0, interface, and software design are among the most popular applications of automated content generation. The paper provides a taxonomy of PCG algorithms and introduces a framework for PCG driven by computational models of user experience. This approach, which we call Experience-Driven Procedural Content Generation (EDPCG), is generic and applicable to various subareas of HCI. We employ games as an example indicative of rich HCI and complex affect elicitation, and demonstrate the approach's effectiveness via dissimilar successful studies.