My Input
This is the primary research project that I did for 2 years at UC Santa Cruz. This originated from looking at past research that Dr. Adam M. Smith (my advisor) had done in the Design Reasoning Lab. From personal gaming experiences and talking amongst friends and peers, I came to realize that this field had not been explored much in games research: the field of player-assistance. My current system, named ChozoMaps, is a Live Coach implementation for Super Metroid aimed to address its gameplay challenge of spatial navigation and non-linear structure.
What motivated me to start this research was that most forms of game assistance either have detailed guidance or integrated game intervention, but never both as much as I would have preferred. Rather than having to gamify a search result or have to give so much context in the help I need (while avoiding spoilers), I would rather ask a friend of mine who is experienced with the game because they know what kind of help I want, they know the game well, and they can provide it to me in a way I understand and prefer.
Comes in Live Coaches, an AI software that integrates large-language models into the player's game for providing in-game, high-context game assistance. It's a mouthful, but why it matters is that a player would interact with the game and reach out to the Live Coach, with context already given and aware, and help the player in the best way possible that the player prefers. To me, the player comes first in the game experience as it is how I've greatly enjoyed playing games throughout my life. I love to collect all things in games and if there was an easy way to ask a quick question on if I had missed something without giving so much context, I would love to have that exist.
My masters thesis below focuses on making the contributions of: live coaches as a genre of software for meaningful player-assistance, system designs of current live coach implementations, a design framework for future systems, and a review of the system using a 10-person ablation user study qualifying how meaningful and prevalent the assistance is to players.
