Student: Ngo, Thuan Van - Report 4.

What is the strength and weakness of game refinement theory?

Game refinement theory can be flexibly applied for a variety of different types of games
including classical board games (chess), video games (dotA), and sports (soccer, volleyball,
baseball). It only requires to realize a reasonable game progress model of a game to evaluate
the attractiveness for it. Basing on the game-refinement measurement i.e. acceleration values
of a game, game developers, sport organizers or rule-making professionals can effectively
modify or devise a more enjoyable games. However, to obtain a suitable game progress
model for further analyzing, it requires much of effort of evaluators. Sometimes, they have
to take time to well understand about or even master at playing a measuring game before
inventing it. The expected model also often raises its potential complication for some
specific games (PAC MAN), thus the computational cost is commonly expensive.
Is it possible to construct a model of game progress for any type of games?
In game refinement theory, game progress model presents how certain the result of the
game in a certain time or steps is. By the notion, the important idea is capturing the result of
a game in any specific state. Or another word, it could be seen that if the possible result is
somehow predicted during the game playing, the progress model can be recognized.
Therefore, the capability for constructing a model of progress for a game is game-dependent
itself. If it lacks of empirical studies, it is vague to say agreement or disagreement. In my
thought, I believe the answer should be YES, it is possible.
Is it possible to obtain a game refinement measure in any other ways?
Many current studies are proving that the current method basing on information acceleration
is effective in estimating the refinement properties for a game. It is only wondered that
whether we should add two regularized factors that represent for external interferences to
the progress model. The first factor called will show the impact of surrounding
environment (audience encouragement, weather, playing devices) to the evolutionary
game - the engagement of players during the game. The second factor called will consider
the effect of society (social networks, promotions, reviews, and so on) to the game. The
influences could increase or decrease the engagement of players in the game ( and can get
a positive or negative value), therefore affect to the attractiveness of the game.
( ) =

(|| + ||)

As a result, it is expected that we could obtain a complete and objective evaluation for game
refinement. However, in reality to collect such external information, it is difficult and
expensive. Moreover, it seems more important to internally study the entertaining
characteristics of games. Or in other words, the game themselves affects to the player to
maintain as well as promote their excitement and concentration during the game. While
involving in those states, some specific biological phenomenon will happen to players such

Student: Ngo, Thuan Van - Report 4.

as: instantly increasing number of heart beats per minutes, excreting more sweat, varying in
blood pressure, etc. Besides, it is feasible to measure the phenomenon of players according
to the exciting duration (d), level of excitement (l) and the number of times being excited (n)
in a game for each considering player. The duration and its corresponding level of
excitement emotion are discrete data but increasing each other, thus we take their
production. To evaluate the ratio of excitement (E) for a game over the number of N players
with respective n times of excitement, we can take average calculation as follows:
1 1

1
( ) ( )
=

= 0 =0

Furthermore, we should consider the gap (g) between two exciting states. The gap decrease
the quality of excitement, hence E should be
1 1

1
( ) ( ) + ( + 1) ( + 1)
=
( ( ) + 1 )

= 0 =1

( ) + 1 is to avoid the case of divided by 0, = 1 means the starting time, and =

1 means the ending time. We expect that the higher value of E is the more interesting
game. Though this measuring approach is only a theoretical idea and needs a lot of
verification and improvement, we hope it could be useful in some aspects of evaluation.

1. The Effects of Emotional Excitement on Pulse, Blood Pressure, and Blood Sugar of
Normal Human Beings
2. Game Wikipedia
3. The Four Keys of Social Impact Games
4. Social Impact Games: Do They Work?
5. Game refinement theory and its application to score limit games
6. Quantifying Engagement of Video Games: Pac-Man and DotA (Defense of the
Ancients)
7. Lecture Note Game refinement theory: sports, video games and more Professor Dr.
Hiroyuki Iida JAIST-IS