Developing games can be improved with Procedural Content Generation (PCG), the automatic creation of game contents, such as levels, music, and vegetation. However, few researches have addressed the impacts of PCG on players, especially in terms of games with educational ends. Hence, this understanding is a research area that demands further studies. To expand on this gap, this article presents a study concerning whether PCG for level creation impacts players’ in-game behavior, based on interactions with a digital math game. This game features two versions that contain a unique difference: while one features human-designed levels, these are procedurally generated on the other version. To compare them, PCG’s impact on players’ in-game behavior was measured through the total played time, number of played levels, and number of retained players. In this context, the findings demonstrated a significant difference in the number of retained players, which was higher for the PCG version in comparison to the other. In contrast, the other two metrics were insignificantly different between versions. Therefore, game designers and developers can exploit these findings to employ PCG in games, taking advantage of its impacts on development and players, knowing how it is expected to affect players’ in-game behavior.

可以使用过程内容生成（PCG）来改进游戏开发过程，该过程是自动创建游戏内容（例如关卡，音乐和植被）的方法。但是，很少有研究解决PCG对玩家的影响，尤其是在具有教育目的的游戏方面。因此，这种理解是需要进一步研究的研究领域。为了扩大这种差距，本文基于与数字数学游戏的交互作用，进行了有关关卡创造的PCG是否会影响玩家的游戏行为的研究。该游戏具有两个版本，这些版本具有独特的区别：一个版本具有人为设计的关卡，而其他版本则是通过程序生成的。为了进行比较，PCG对玩家游戏行为的影响通过总播放时间，播放级别数和保留的玩家数来衡量。在这种情况下，调查结果表明保留的玩家数量存在显着差异，PCG版本与其他版本相比更高。相反，其他两个指标在版本之间差异不明显。因此，游戏设计人员和开发人员可以利用这些发现，将PCG运用于游戏中，从而充分利用PCG对开发和玩家的影响，知道PCG将如何影响玩家的游戏行为。