Measuring flow as concept for detecting game fun in the Pac-Man game

Abstract

Popular games often have a high-quality graphic design but quite simple-minded non player characters (NPC). Recently, Computational Intelligence (CI) methods have been discovered as suitable methods to revive NPC, making games more interesting, challenging, and funny. We present a fairly large study of human players on the simple arcade game Pac-Man, controlling the ghosts behaviors by simple strategies, neural networks or evolutionary algorithms. The playerpsilas fun is of course a subjective experience, but we presume that it is related to the psychological flow concept. We deal with the question whether flow is a more reliable measure than asking human players directly for the fun experienced during the game. In order to detect flow, we introduce a measure based on the interaction time fraction between the human-controlled Pac-Man and the ghosts, and compare the outcome to the results of a fun measure suggested by Yannakakis and Hallam [1].