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Tasks of different nature and difficulty levels are a part of people’s lives. In this context, there is a scientific interest in the relationship between the difficulty of the task and the persistence need to accomplish it. Despite the generality of this problem, some tasks can be simulated in the form of games. In this way, we employ data from a large online platform, called Steam, to analyze games and the performance of their players. More specifically, we investigated persistence in completing tasks based on the proportion of players who accomplished game achievements. Overall, we present five major findings. First, the probability distribution for the number of achievements is log-normal distribution. Second, the distribution of game players also follows a log-normal. Third, most games require neither a very high degree of persistence nor a very low one. Fourth, players also prefer games that demand a certain intermediate persistence. Fifth, the proportion of players as a function of the number of achievements declines approximately exponentially. As both the log-normal and the exponential functions are memoryless, they are mathematical forms that describe random effects arising from the nature of the system. Therefore our first two findings describe random processes of fragmenting achievements and players while the last three provide a quantitative measure of the human preference in the pursuit of challenging, achievable and justifiable tasks.

One of the main costs of developing a videogame is content creation. Procedural Content Generation (PCG) can help alleviate that cost by algorithmically generating some of the content a human would normally produce. We first describe and classify the different types of content that can be automatically generated for a videogame. Then, we review the most prominent PCG algorithms, focusing on current research on search-based and machine learning based methods. Finally, we close with our take on the most important open problems and the potential impact solving them will have on the videogame industry.

This paper is a first attempt to systematically explore the main characteristics of videogames and the particular problems encountered in their development. As an example of an emerging creative industry, videogames are an instance of what we term interactive experiential products. Our study is based on 65 project reports, which were used to examine how the product's interactive nature created certain characteristics in the product's development processes. We find that videogame development displays experiential processes similar to those used in other products which embody "experiential" development processes, such as frequent milestones and testing, multiple design iterations, multifunctional teams and strong project leadership. We also show that there are some subtleties or peculiarities that are specific to games even within these characteristics, such as more complex concurrent development, pipelining and integration issues. Some characteristics are more unique to videogame development, such as "feature creep" and "feature iteration". In general, this results from the complex combination of technology, (creative) game design and (artistic) content within videogames, which causes complexity and uncertainty in the development process. At one extreme, videogames may suffer from not being subject to a full testing cycle until near the end of the project, and given the high uncertainty of consumer's receptivity to the product, this makes for a difficult development situation. While the use of more rational development processes (such as formal software development practices from software engineering) could help with these issues, new thinking can also be done in the future about whether new and more appropriate product development models can be developed to address the needs of videogame development.