Caio Varalta presented our paper Beyond Metrics: A Human Validation Study of Procedural Personas in a Continuous Game Arena at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE 2026), held at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, from November 9 to 13, 2026. It is a full paper in the main conference.

Game-playing agents that act like different kinds of players, called procedural personas, are a promising way to automate playtesting. But does a human watching them actually see the intended play style? We trained five persona types with reinforcement learning in a real-time 2D arena and showed them to 34 people.

The personas played measurably differently, but people did not recognize them all equally: the extreme types were easy to spot, while the subtler ones were often confused. How believable an agent seemed did not predict whether people recognized its persona. The code is open source as a baseline for future work.

Caio is a Master’s student at UNESP, co-supervised by Leonardo Tórtoro Pereira and me. The paper is joint work with Arnaldo Martins de Godoy, Eugênio Higgins and Leonardo Tórtoro Pereira.