Paper: Motivation based difficulty adaptation for therapeutic games

Hocine, N.; Gouaich, A.; Di Loreto, I.; Joab, M., "Motivation based difficulty adaptation for therapeutic games," Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), 2011 IEEE 1st International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1,8, 16-18 Nov. 2011

This paper presents presents a difficulty adaptation technique dedicated to a family of therapeutic games for post-stroke rehabilitation based on therapeutic serious game, they focus in upper limb rehabilitation.

As introduction they talk about studies that suggest intensive training (many repetitions) while giving feedbacks and motivating the patients can have an important impact on the patients’ skills recover.  And a person who enjoys what he is doing spends more time developing his skills in a given activity.

They developed a game that is based on the Wii-balance from Nintendo. This game aims to improve player’s equilibrium capabilities while achieving the game goals.

Paper: Player Modeling for Intelligent Difficulty Adjustment

Olana Missura and Thomas. 2009. Player Modeling for Intelligent Difficulty Adjustment. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Discovery Science (DS '09).

In the other articles I read this week I focused on the interface design. I like this article because is very important to provide players the appropriate and increasing difficulty. Wrong choices can easily lead to players stopping to play the game as they get bored or frustrated.