How to Design Personalized Challenges for Long-Term
Engagement? Ask your players
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ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
Serious games can be defined as "a game in which education
(in its various forms) is the primary goal, rather than entertain-
ment" [14]. The research topic regarding them is growing, and
they are routinely applied for learning, education and training.
For example, in recent years, they have been successfully ap-
plied with the objective to increase citizens engagement for
sustainable mobility behaviours [10, 8, 5, 6].
Although they have been proven to effectively promote
changes to the behaviour of end users, one crucial aspect
of their application is the user long-term engagement. To
be truly effective, behavioural changes promoted by serious
games must be sustained over time. Typically the approach
is to recognize the effort of the players based on their perfor-
mance, and to provide gratification, some of which must be
independent from the accumulation of game status over time.
A common game mechanic for this objective is the challenge.
It consists in proposing to a given player to reach a specific
goal, whose achievement requires a prolonged individual com-
mitment, typically within a limited period that is significantly
shorter than the game as a whole. A prize is awarded to the
the player if he manages to fulfil the goal within the allotted
time.
Challenge goals target either in-game performance (such as
gaining a certain number of points, reaching a game level,
completing a badge collection), or specific behaviours pro-
moted by the game (such as achieving a specific number of
virtuous actions).
In order to maximise the engagement provided by the chal-
lenge game mechanic, two concept are fundamental: the
choice between different goals, and the difficulty of each goal.
By providing a choice between goals within the gamified
system, players are able to create their own story. Feeling
this autonomy in the system directly links to a more positive
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mental state, as suggested by the Self Determination Theory
[15].
Moreover, the difficulty of the goals should increase as the
player’s skill increase. This is the concept of flow: a player
who is in a state of flow is fully engaged with the system. This
state can occur when the player understands what actions are
needed to take to reach specific goals. This typically hap-
pens when the difficulty of the challenges in the gamification
system increases as the player’s skill increases [3]. When a
gamification systems does not get more challenging, it creates
boredom. On the other hand, the player may feel anxiety or
frustration if the challenge is too far above his or her skill level.
Engagement is reached when the challenges match the skill
level of the player.
In this paper we present a novel approach for automatic per-
sonalized generation of challenges, taking into account both
the need of ensuring the aspects of choice and difficulty for
maximizing user long-term retention. We tackle this problem
through Procedural Content Generation (PCG) of playable
units that appeal to each individual player and make her user
experience more varied and compelling [7].
We evaluate the proposed approach in the context of a large-
scale and long-running sustainable urban mobility project.
The approach can be directly applied to any other gamifica-
tion application which bases user advancement based on its
performance.
RELATED WORK
Gamification is an appealing topic, but over the years some
common problem have arisen. One of the main limitation is the
difficulty to sustain the interest of a player in a gamified system
over a long term. As their interest in game decreases, typically
also decreases the effects of behavioural change brought by the
game. Since players have different characteristics, an universal
solution is infeasible, as would bring some players to boredom
and others to frustration.
A solution is to exploits personalization techniques, able to
tailor the game experience to each player. Procedural Content
Generation (PCG) is a set of techniques designed to automate
the construction of Game Design Elements (GDEs), such
as game items, encounters, buildings, or even whole levels.
This allows to improve the experience of players by reducing
repetition, that is usually perceived negatively.
For example in [17] the authors introduce a combinatorial
optimization approach for creating training scenarios from
scratch, tailoring it to the skill level of the players. This in
turn leads to an increase in user engagement, and to a more
effective training.
A special attention must be given to the calibration of the
difficulty of the game. "Given that both failure and success can
become repetitive quickly, games must address the problem of
meeting all players with the correct level of challenge." [13].
Rather than reward only with points and badges, it is needed
to provide opportunities for the player to succeed in a game
by overcoming challenges [1].
The idea of personalizing game content to the players show
great potential for keeping players engaged through the con-
cept of flow. It can be described as a balance between chal-
lenge and competence, or between complexity or boredom
[4].
One of the goals of adaptive challenge calibration is to aim
to keep players in a state of flow. Many attempts have been
conducted in this direction.
In [12], the authors employ an approach of Dynamic Difficult
Adjustment (DDA) to the game of Tetris. The idea is to ob-
serve a given game, extract a defined set of features based on
piece movement and placement, and categorize the player’s
skill in a three level scale (newbie, average, expert). Based
on this placement the game varies the number of "helpful"
next Tetris pieces provided. Their experiments show the user
evaluate more favourably their user experience when improved
by DDA.
In [16], the authors develop an automatic generation of tracks
for a racing game. They first evaluate the player’s skill, and
the proceed to generate a track that the player would describe
as "fun". This is determined by the difficulty of the curves
presented in the track, and the variation in this difficulty.
In [2] the authors aim to introduce difficulty adjustment to the
context of Human Computation Games (HCGs). They do so
drawing inspiration from the user-matching commonly found
in multiplayer games, in order to determine an interesting
choice of tasks for the final user.
PROBLEM DEFINITION
We implemented our approach in the context of FictiousGa-
meName, a gamified system whose purpose is to induce a
Voluntary Travel Behavior Change (VTBC). The game aims
to promote CO2 -free means of transportation and/or public
transportation. This is a project performed annually from 2015.
In the last iteration, it was conducted in a six-month period
(October 2018 - March 2019?), over 25 weeks.
In FictiousGameName, citizens record their daily trips, indi-
cating the mean of transportation: by walk, bike, bus, train, or
car. For each virtuous trip (all save the last one) they receive
points, called green leaves, that are then used to calculate the
leaderboard. Tracked itineraries are checked by an automatic
itinerary validation algorithm. Each week, physical prizes
offered by sponsors were given from player chosen from the
weekly top 50 players. The leaderboard and the prizes consti-
tute the basic extrinsic motivation for the players to play the
game.
In order to further incentivize players and to keep them en-
gaged, weekly challenges were introduced. They constitute
of a goal given to the player, to be completed in a given max-
imum amount of time. If completed they would reward the
user with a given amount of additional green leaves (the point
mechanic used in the game). The most common kind of chal-
lenges issued asked the user to reach a given amount of tracked
kilometres using a given mean of transportation during the
course of a week.
Given their nature, the challenges naturally required to be
tailored to the player mobility habits. The objective of the
goal was to promote a personal improvement of the citizen
lifestyle. In order to be effective, this improvement should be
"appropriate". Asking for an improvement too slight brings
no utility for the overall goal of the gamified system. On the
other hand, an improvement too large might scare the user and
cause him to leave the game. This share many similarities to
the concept of flow.
As a preliminary step, we evaluated the performances of each
player as time series, with the objective to predict the future
performances based on the past recorded ones. This has unfor-
tunately proved infeasible.
We used GMDH, a method that has been credited with superior
performance than the classical forecasting algorithms such
as Single Exponential Smooth, Double Exponential Smooth,
ARIMA and back-propagation neural network [11]. On the
task of predicting the performance of the next week, GMDH
obtained a mean MASE (Mean Absolute Scaled Error, [9])
of 1.46. This means that it was less accurate of the naïve
predictor, which just forecasted the last seen value.
We speculate that this has to do with two primary reasons: the
scarcity of data in the time series, and the highly volatility of
the player’s performance. Regarding the first point, the number
of observation in the time series was at most of 25 elements.
The number of non-zero values however was typically much
lower, as most of the players started to play after the game’s
start, and some stopped to play before its ending.
PERFORMANCE ESTIMATION
choice of the user, autonomy
The concept of choice and autonomy are very important for the
creation of an immersive gameplay. Thus they were introduced
in the gamified system right from the start.
For all users the gamified system provided a fixed challenge
to be beaten in the following week. However, by reaching
a given level, the users were given two challenges to choose
from, and later three challenges. The required levels were
fairly low, in order to offer this game mechanic to each player
that was slightly active, yet presenting it as a reward. The
game offered two different kind of choices.
The first was the choice on the performance indicator to im-
prove. Five where available in the gamified system: total
amount of kilometers recorded by either walking or biking,
the total amount of trips recorded using either the bus or the
train, or the amount of green leaves (the point system) col-
lected. The gamified system offered the choice between the
indicators in which the user was most active in the previous
week. The goal for each indicator was computed based on the
user’s past performance. We will detail this in Section 5.
The second kind was the choice on the goal. The performance
indicator was automatically chosen from the one in which the
user was most active in the previous week. Again the initial
goal was computed based on the user’s past performance, as
(a) Question posed to the user.
detailed in Section 5. Based on this, additional goals were
presented to the user. For the two-challenge choice, the ad-
ditional goal was 10% higher than the initial one. For the
three-challenge choices, the two additional goals were respec-
tively 10% higher and 10% lower. Each goal would bring
a different amount of green leaves (the points in the serious
game), giving the user the choice for the difficulty of their
game.

DIFFICULTY CALIBRATION
As we have mentioned, deciding the correct difficulty of a
task is a challenge itself. A difficult too low, or too high, (b) Example of answer.
would push the player to stop playing, either via boredom or
frustration. This is a concept that is easily explained, but is
difficult to define.
Drawing ideas from (?), we designed a type of questionnaire
that would help us understanding which is the range of im-
provement that we should expect from a player. The question-
naire constituted of nine graphs of past performance. Each
graph regarded a single action that was recorded in the game,
for the last six weeks, in order. For example, the first graph,
shown in Figure 1a, pertains to the total amount of kilometres
that an user has recorded by walking, for each of the last six
weeks, in order (the last point is the most recent). (c) Example of aggregated response.

The nine graphs were taken from real data, and chosen in order
to represent all the range of possible performance progression,
as shown in Figure ??. The first row show a rising pattern (the
user is improving its performance); the second row a stable
pattern (the user is mainting its performance); the third row
is a declining pattern (the user is worsening its performance).
The second column and the third column exhibit a sudden
change in performance during one week. Each user received
a questionnaire where the graph were randomly shuffled in
order.
We selected 20 user from explain where and why.
We asked the user to write on the graph would he/she think
would have been the correct challenge to issue to that particular
player, taking into account only the short window of its past
performance. Users were also able to write down a short
description of their though process, as shown in Figure 1b.
We collected the answers and recorded the proposed goal for
each graph. An example of the aggregated responses is given
in Figure 1c, while we show the complete responses in Figure
??.
Figure 1: Example of a graph of the questionnaire, pertain-
ing total amount of kilometres recorded walking during the
previous six weeks.
The next step was to find a function able to approximate the in-
tentions expressed in the questionnaire. We desired a function
that was of easy interpretation. By its definition, a challenge
requires an increment of the player’s efforts. So we chose to
model the challenge prediction as:
C = P ∗ I, (1)
where C is the goal of the challenge, P is the prediction of
the player’s efforts, and I is the improvement. We choose to
model it as a linear function; a future work could be to assess
other functions.
For the estimation of We considered the following extrapola-
tion functions: Linear, Polynomial, Conic, Moving Average,
Weighted Moving Average. The rationale was to approximate
the intentions expressed in the questionnaire, as all of their rea-
soning took into consideration the past performances shown in
the graph. In particular, no user indicated that their reasoning
was based on only the last performance. Thus all methods
were tested taking into consideration a number of previous
points in the range [2, 5] (this means basing the prediction on
the performance of the past two weeks, three, etc. up to five).
The function were evaluated comparing the difference of their
outcome to the mean responses of the questionnaire, using the
MAPE (Mean absolute percentage error) as an error function,
since the graphs pertained different performance indicator with
different ranges.
In the end the lowest MAPE was found with the combination
of WMA-5 as the prediction function (Weighted Moving Aver-
age over the last 5 recorded level of performance), and I = 1.3,
corresponding to an increase of 30% over the predicted user
performance.
EVALUATION
Mean difficulty
1.34
1.32
1.3
0 5 10 15
week
Figure 2: Mean difficulty of the challenges proposed in the
serious game.
We employed the proposed approach during the course of the
serious game. For the first part of the game, the challenges
were proposed with the naïve approach of proposing a goal
that was directly computed using the performance observed
during the the last week and a fixed improvement factor in
{1.2, 1.3, 1.4}. Our novel approach was introduced starting
from the eleventh week. This allows us to directly compare its
effects to the naïve approach.
In Figure 2 we compare the mean difficulty of the challenges
proposed. The difficulty was computed as the ratio of the
requested performance and the performance observed during
the last week. It is a measure of the effort required to the
players. We can observe the mean difficulty during the first
weeks was higher, since most of the players were starting to
play, and slightly decreased during the following weeks. After
the introduction of the novel approach, at week 11, the mean
difficulty of the challenges was more regular, and slightly
higher than during the application of the naïve approach.
The main objective of this work was to improve user’s engage-
ment. As a measure of this we compare the choice rate of the
challenges. When the player reached a fixed level they were
proposed a set of challenges, and were able to choose their
challenge for the next week. If the user didn’t make a choice,
the user would automatically choose one challenge for them
at twelve o’clock of Friday. The thus measured the percent-
age of players that did choose their challenge, from all the
players that were given a choice (the set of different available
challenges). We call this percentage choice rate. We use it
to measure the user’s engagement as an user that performed
the choice can reasonably be expected to be still interested
in the game and actively playing, compared to an user than
will passively accept the choice made for them by the system.
We considered for each week only the users that recorded at
least one activity during that week. We thus didn’t consider
users that were inactive. The results are shown in Figure 3.
In the first weeks the choice rate was high, indicating an high
engagement most probably due to the novelty of the game, but
soon started to decrease, most probably due to lost interest by
the players. After the introduction of the novel approach, at
week 11, the choice rate had an increase that was sustained
over time. We can conclude that the novel approach had a
direct effect of improving the user’s engagement within the
gamified system.
0.6
Choice ratio
0.5
0.4
0 5 10 15 20
week
Figure 3: Choice ratio of the challenges proposed in the serious
game.
We also observed the effect of the novel approach on the com-
pletion rate of the challenges. This is the percentage of users
that completed their challenges. Again we considered for each
week only users that were active during that week. The results
are shown in Figure 4. During the first week the completion
0.8
Completion ratio
0.7
0.6
0.5
0 5 10 15 20
week
Figure 4: Completion ratio of the challenges proposed in the
serious game.
 1.8
Mean improvement
1.6
1.4
Walk Km
Bus Trips
1.2
Bike Km
Train Trips
1 Maimone, Judith Masthoff, and Giulio Jacucci. 2014.
green leaves
5 10 15 20
week
Figure 5: Mean improvement of the challenges proposed in
the serious game.
rate was high, but quickly degraded, probably due to the nov-
elty of the game wearing off. After the introduction of our
novel approach, the completion rate increased, stabilizing to
an higher mean value. This shows that our novel approach im-
proved the completion rate within the game system. It should
be noted that during the second part of the game, the mean
difficulty of the challenges didn’t decrease, as shown in the
first graph.
In the end, we also observed the improvement on the desired
change on the user’s behaviour brought by the gamified sys-
tem. We thus compare the mean improvement of the user’s
performance for each week, for each of the possible desirable
actions rewarded by the game. These are: the total number of
kilometers recorded by walking or biking, the total amount of
trips recorded using the bus or the train, or the amount of green
leaves (the point system) collected. Also in this evaluation we
considered for each week only the users that were active in
that week. The improvement is computed as the ratio of the
user’s performance in a given week and its performance in the
previous week. We show the mean improvement in Figure 5.
Following the introduction of the novel approach, in general
the mean improvement increased for all the five indicators,
showing a direct increase.
CONCLUSION
We introduced a novel approach for the automatic generation
of challenges in a gamified system whose purpose was to
promote CO2 -free and public transportation. Our approach
was based on the responses of a questionnaire we devised
with the goal of finding a consistent approach for challenge
generation.
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