At first glance, the concept of personalization, i.e. making an experience unique to the individual, might seem like something gaming mastered back in the days when a high score granted immortality in the arcades. This isn’t true though. While exceptions do exist, especially in the RPG genre, gamers are usually funneled down the same virtual pathways, encountering the same monsters, puzzles, and story points as everybody else.
Resident Evil 4
Let’s get the obvious point out of the way. Personalization on a grand scale might as well be impossible. Features like procedural generation, branching dialogue, and important crossroads in a game’s plot do a good job of making each playthrough different but they all come with their own constraints. For instance, a game with “random” planets like No Man’s Sky still uses templates (around ten) to produce them.
In its purest sense, a personalized experience would create a dramatically different game for each player, letting them make decisions that shape the world according to their own whims or sense of morality. For many reasons, this is undesirable. Games generally only have a few “choose your own adventure”-style moments so that the story remains coherent and the player can’t accidentally ruin their own experience.
Still, efforts at personalization do exist, albeit in a subtle way. Both Resident Evil 4 and Left 4 Dead 2 have adaptive difficulties, which means that the game will monitor the player's performance and make things easier or harder depending on how they’re doing. Left 4 Dead 2 calls this feature The Director. The Director is capable of spawning items and enemies, and even altering the structure of maps to force the player to take a tougher route.
A Personalised Journey
While it might sound vindictive at times, this kind of feedback ultimately produces a more rewarding experience for players at every skill level. The same kind of thinking has also cropped up in the casino industry lately, where the idea of personalized prizes and jackpots was mentioned on the iGamingBusiness website. Why? Nearly 7,000 games were released to casinos in 2022 - but what makes one more attractive than another?
PlayStar’s online slots real money section offers some answers. The site has games based on aspects of pop culture (Guns N' Roses, Jimi Hendrix, Hell's Kitchen, etc.) as well as slots that clearly aim to impress with their aesthetics, like Cornelius, which features a cartoon cat. Apart from that, a new trend in the form of 'live' casino games has allowed players to experience a more immersive iteration of their beloved online casino games. This is because they can interact with real-time croupiers via webcams.
Essentially, personalized content fixes a problem faced by businesses in all sectors, namely, that 71% of shoppers want a customized journey to the checkout, and will actually leave if they don’t get it. While connecting this to video and casino gaming might seem a bit of a stretch, both of these hobbies rely on a rewarding experience to provide value for money.
So, whether gaming will ever ascend to the point of true world creation is debatable but subtle tweaks to a player's experience can be beneficial, as in the examples from Resident Evil 4 and Left 4 Dead 2, earlier.
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