Personalization in Serious Games as a Multidimensional Design Space: Lessons from In-the-Wild Studies

Titolo

Personalization in Serious Games as a Multidimensional Design Space: Lessons from In-the-Wild Studies

Abstract

Personalization is widely regarded as a key driver of engagement and impact in serious games and gamified systems, yet the term is often used loosely, covering everything from tailoring a narrative to adjusting difficulty in real time. This talk explores game personalization as a multidimensional design and research space, drawing on findings from in-the-wild studies across different application contexts.

We frame personalization along four dimensions, organized around two core questions. The first concerns what is personalized: its granularity, from designing for a target group or context, to clustering users by engagement, behavioral stage, or player type, to adapting to individual player characteristics; and its target, i.e., which elements of the game are personalized, including narrative, mechanics, dynamics, feedback, and rewards. The second concerns how personalization unfolds: its timing, whether it is set once at design time or continuously adjusted during play; and the player’s agency in the process, i.e., whether adaptation is system-driven, player-driven, or negotiated between the two.

Grounded in psychological models of behavior and motivation, and enabled by AI techniques for user modeling and adaptation, personalization is inherently transdisciplinary, drawing on HCI, AI, and behavioral and social sciences alike. Rather than treating this as a purely theoretical exercise, the talk grounds the framework in a series of in-the-wild studies, discussing what these studies reveal about the actual impact of personalization, where current approaches fall short, and where the open challenges lie.