Understanding Players as if They Are Talking to the Game in a Customized Language: A Pilot Study

Tianze Wang, Maryam Honarijahromi, Styliani Katsarou, Olga Mikheeva, Theodoros Panagiotakopoulos, Oleg Smirnov, Lele Cao, Sahar Asadi

Abstract: This pilot study explores the application of language models (LMs) to model game event sequences, treating them as a customized natural language. We investigate a popular mobile game, transforming raw event data into textual sequences and pretraining a Longformer model on this data. Our approach captures the rich and nuanced interactions within game sessions, effectively identifying meaningful player segments. The results demonstrate the potential of self-supervised LMs in enhancing game design and personalization without relying on ground-truth labels.