RPGPref: A Planning Heuristic that Uses Playstyle Preferences to Model Player Action and Choice

Abstract

Recent work extending planning algorithms that reason about action and change has been successful at supporting game design, player modeling, and story generation. Incorporating agent preferences over actions and propositions into a planning process allows for a more accurate prediction of what a human might do when solving a problem like playing through a game level. This paper presents the preference-based planning heuristic RPGPREF which uses relaxed plan graphs (RPGs) and preference sets to guide a planner toward a preference-conforming path to its goal. A human subjects evaluation confirms that RPGPREF successfully guides the planning process toward solution plans that recognizably match and differentiate player playstyles.