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Understanding Mario: An Evaluation of Design Metrics For Platformers
Conference proceeding

Understanding Mario: An Evaluation of Design Metrics For Platformers

Adam Summerville, Julian R. H. Marino, Sam Snodgrass, Santiago Ontanon and Levi H. S. Lelis
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 12TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF DIGITAL GAMES (FDG'17), v 130151
01 Jan 2017

Abstract

Computer Science Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications Computer Science, Software Engineering Science & Technology Technology
Evaluating the output of content generators is still one of the key open research challenges in Procedural Content Generation (PCG). This paper presents a collection of metrics for evaluating the quality of platform game levels, and analyzes how well these metrics are able to capture the human-perceived difficulty, visual aesthetics and enjoyment of these levels. We show empirically, in the context of Infinite Mario Bros (IMB), that some of the proposed metrics yield correlation values with human ratings that are near empirical upper bounds derived from a human inter-rater agreement study. We also show that a simple linear regression model using a subset of our metrics as input features is able to substantially outperform a previous approach that uses a neural network for predicting human-perceived difficulty, visual aesthetics, and enjoyment in IMB levels.

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33 citations in Scopus

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Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications
Computer Science, Software Engineering
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