Problem Statement
- Games have no idea about your preferences.
- Games do not share your preferences.
- Games tend to forget your preferences.
- Games have no proper configuration nomenclature.
Several years ago we realized there was an unpleasant issue in personal
computer gaming. You must routinely spend time to configure new games,
even though every time you deal with roughly the same set of options
and bindings. Nothing to worry about if you play Tetris and Pacman.
But an average First-Person Shooter contains about 60 configuration
parameters (approximately half of them options and half of them
bindings), and a Real-Time Strategy has 45 parameters on the average.
Now, game developers certainly have some idea about reasonable defaults
for options, about automatically detecting some of the values required,
and about playable layouts of controls. However, no one can predict
exact preferences of the person who will be playing a game, that's why
game setup screens exist in the first place.
Only the gamer knows whether the mouse vertical axis needs to be
inverted. And if you happen to like it inverted, you have probably
noticed that many games don't get it right by default. The same goes
for many other options and for layouts of controls. If the developers
cannot predict and the games are unable to, the gamer has to do it
on his own.
So we say that games have no idea about your preferences. You
are a total stranger to each and every new game, and often even to
the games you reinstall. The latter happens because games tend to
forget your preferences. When you uninstall a game, you may lose
your preferences related to that game. Of course, this one is
the lesser of evils, since many games provide an option of keeping
the preferences. However, this feature also calls for a systemic approach.
Although semantically the sets of configuration parameters in games
of the same genre intersect largely, games are unable to share that
information with one another. Every game is a total stranger to
every other game.
This is understandable, because games have no proper configuration
nomenclature (more on that later), but definitely not right. Games can be
taught a common language similarly to what has been done in the area of
automated natural language translation.
So the problem is: gamer's preferences are stable, but games cannot dig this.
Next Slide: Worst Kind of Lies
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Presentation Slides |
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 1. Problem Statement
2. Worst Kind of Lies
3. Need for Nomenclature
4. Configuration Linguistics, part I
5. Configuration Linguistics, part II
6. Persistent Preferences Memory
7. Discovery of Preferences, part I
8. Discovery of Preferences, part II
9. Personalizer Summary
More information is available...
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