Adaptive serious games using agent organizations

Abstract

Increasing complexity in serious games and the need to reuse and adapt games to different purposes and different user needs, requires distributed development approaches. The use of software agents has been advocated as a means to deal with the complexity of serious games. Current approaches to dynamic adjustability in games make it possible for different elements to adjust to the player. However, these approaches most use centralized control, which becomes impractical if the complexity and the number of adaptable elements increase. The serious games we are investigating are constructed using complex and independent subtasks that influence each other. In this paper, we propose a model for game adaptation that is guided by three main concerns: the trainee, the game objectives and the agents. In particular we focus on how the adaptation engine determines tasks to be adapted and how agents respond to such requests and modify their plans accordingly. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.