Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment In Educational Video Games

Over the past two decades, educational video games have established themselves as an innovative tool for motivated and engaging learning, in which the player learns the didactic content with less effort and solves various learning tasks with increased interest. One way to improve the learner's attention, engagement, and motivation is to use the dynamic adjustment of the difficulty of the gameplay and/or the learning content in these games, which is based on changes in certain characteristics of the player. The article presents an overview of player-centric dynamic difficulty adjustment methods in video games for educational purposes. It examines the approaches used for tailoring the difficulty of game tasks, in terms of what tasks in educational video games should have dynamically adapted difficulty, and what features of their execution are subject to dynamic changes. For this purpose, specific characteristics of the learning player appropriate for such adaptation are summarized. Also considered are possible implementations of the feedback loop, i.e., how these dynamic changes could happen, applying a positive, negative, or combined feedback based on the specificities of the player. Finally, challenges and trends in modern dynamic tailoring of difficulty are pre-sented, together with ways for assessing and measuring the effect of dynamic ad-justment of difficulty.