Incongruity-based adaptive game balancing

Commercial games possess various methods of game balancing. Each of them modifies the game’s entertainment value for players of different skill levels. This paper deals with one of them, viz. a way of automatically adapting a game’s balance which is based on the theory of incongruity. We tested our approach on a group of subjects, who played a game with three difficulty settings. The idea is to maintain a specific difference in incongruity automatically. We tested our idea extensively and may report that the results coincide with the theory of incongruity as far as positive incongruity is concerned. The main conclusion is that, owing to our automatically maintained balanced difficulty setting, we can avoid that a game becomes boring or frustrating.