Facilitating player progression by implementing procedural music in videogames
Jayden Chan, Justin John Daza, William Kwan, Anup Basu · 2017
While the multi-million-dollar videogame industry sees constant improvements in visuals and processing power with every new processor, gaming console, or graphics card release, is there any avenue to pursue new innovations in this discipline? One answer lies in the introduction of procedural music in videogames as an innovative means of overcoming the repetitive nature of traditionally composed game music and to enhance the immersive response of game music to player actions. While most studies are preoccupied with the descriptive evaluation of how entertaining procedural music is in comparison to traditionally composed music, we pursue a novel study on the utility of implementing procedural music in videogames as a tool for facilitating player progression. To do so we employ objective, quantitative measures to gather results that can quantify the utility of implementing procedural videogame music, unlike other studies. We demonstrate that users playing a game with a procedural music model that actively instructs and assists players can complete game levels in a significantly more time efficient manner and are more likely to rate the procedural music model as having significantly contributed to the game's entertainment and engagement.