Dead on arrival: Adapting games to finish at a given time or location

Abstract

Casual and other games often serve as time-killing applications, be it on the commuter train or in the back seat of a shared car. When one arrives at the destination, the game has to be interrupted or aborted, which is annoying or even frustrating. Hence, we propose to continuously adapt the game's level of difficulty to the estimated remaining time to arrival. This can be preset as a number of minutes or can continuously be estimated from the player's position in relation to a predefined destination. Our dungeon-style prototype is based on an automated engine for content placement and can also make use of GPS data. We report on preliminary results from user tests. © ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2009.