Title
Using Monte Carlo tree search and google maps to improve game balancing in location-based games
Abstract
Location-Based games (LBGs) are a subtype of digital games that uses the location of players as a key component for playability, including changes to the game state. However, a significant challenge that threatens the development and popularization of LBGs is the game balancing. Since LBGs rely on players' location, it is hard to manually design interactions, challenges, and game scenarios for each part of the world. Thus, the same LBG is likely to present varying difficulty levels depending on the player's location due to differences in terrain, distance, and transport availability. As a result, even modern LBGs show huge balancing differences between regions and they do not explore competition between players like other game genres. In this paper, we present measurements to estimate game balancing in modern LBGs and introduce a method that uses Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to automatically edit instances of these games to minimize differences in game balancing. Additionally, we present a study detailing the improvements in game balancing when using the proposed method in today's two most popular LBGs (Ingress and Pokémon Go).
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1109/CIG.2017.8080438
2017 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG)
Keywords
Field
DocType
Location-based Games,Game Balancing,Monte Carlo Tree Search,Google Maps
Monte Carlo method,Monte Carlo tree search,Computational intelligence,Computer science,Simulation,Terrain,Game balancing,Artificial intelligence,Machine learning
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5386-3234-5
0
0.34
References 
Authors
15
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Luís Fernando Maia Silva100.34
Windson Viana220128.40
Fernando Trinta33914.93