Wonders of Seabed: Difficulty Evaluation of Management Games Using Neural Network - Technologies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence - page 163

Wonders of Seabed: Diculty Evaluation
of Management Games Using Neural Network
Cheng-Yi Huang, Yi-Chen Lee, Chia-An Yu,
Yi-Zheng Lee, and Sai-Keung Wong
National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan (R.O.C.)
[e-mail]
Abstract. In management games, players enjoy developing the virtual
objects, such as avatars, farms, villages, cities, resources, etc. Usually,
the management games do not have a time limit to play. Players know
little about how much time that they need to devote in order to quickly
build up the virtual objects. This paper studies about the diculty level
of the management games. That is, under a limit amount of time, how far
a player can develop the objects. We propose to adopt a neural network
to evaluate the diculty of such kind of games. There is a diverse set of
features supported by management games. Thus, we have developed a
manageable management game called Wonders of Seabed. Our game is
a 3D game and the game story happens at the seabed. Players need to
develop a city by managing different resources. Our method can adjust
the game diculty for the players.
Keywords: management games, game balance, game evaluation, neural
network, game diculty.
1 Introduction
Games are useful for people to learn knowledge and they are widely used for
educational and training purposes [2][6]. Serious games are also considered for
healthcare training [7]. Management games enable players to acquire knowledge
and they have educational purposes. Management games have become popular
since SimCity. Management games enable players to develop the virtual farms,
cities and other virtual items. Players can create any items supported in the
games and gradually upgrade the items. The players have fun by organizing and
beautifying the virtual items in the game. However, management games could
be time consuming and tedious to play. It would take a long time to collect the
required items.
We take SimCity as an example. In SimCity, the tax policy is employed to
control the development of the cities. A player acts as a government agent.
He or she establishes different policy rules to improve the income. Almost all
the money is collected from taxes of citizens. If the tax rates are too high in the
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