Oops, Not Now: PEARL, a RAG-Based Support Agent for Gameplay and What Players Want from AI Help

Jiahong Li; Sai Siddartha Maram; Atieh Kashani; Ulia Zaman; Zhiyu Lin; Cameron Marano; Roger Azevedo; Jichen Zhu; Magy Seif El-Nasr

arXiv · 2609.13718

Oops, Not Now: PEARL, a RAG-Based Support Agent for Gameplay and What Players Want from AI Help

Jiahong Li·Sai Siddartha Maram·Atieh Kashani·Ulia Zaman·Zhiyu Lin·Cameron Marano·Roger Azevedo·Jichen Zhu·Magy Seif El-Nasr

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Abstract

AI-powered gameplay support agents hold promise for game-based learning, yet grounding generative models in structured game data remains an open challenge. We present PEARL (Parallel Education Agent for Reflection and Learning), a dual-component Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that combines semantic knowledge retrieval with structural board-state matching to deliver contextualized scaffolding in Parallel, a puzzle game for learning parallel programming. PEARL operates on two input streams (natural language queries and board topology), retrieving both conceptual explanations of gameplay moves and peer-generated board states as evidence: capabilities unavailable to a standard Large Language Model (LLM) with game state access alone. In a qualitative evaluation (N=10) comparing PEARL against an existing community-based Open Player Model (OPM) visualization system, participants preferred the visualization system on perceived usefulness and reported higher frustration with PEARL; five of ten minimized or abandoned the AI tool during play. Proactive delivery, generic responses, and trust deficits drove disengagement, while a subset of four participants found PEARL's grounded explanations complementary to visualization in specific contexts where they initiated the interaction. We position PEARL as a deployed design probe whose failure modes inform a concrete design agenda for AI gameplay support, captured as seven open problems for the community.

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Jiahong Li, Sai Siddartha Maram, Atieh Kashani, Ulia Zaman, Zhiyu Lin, Cameron Marano, Roger Azevedo, Jichen Zhu, Magy Seif El-Nasr. 2026-09-12. Oops, Not Now: PEARL, a RAG-Based Support Agent for Gameplay and What Players Want from AI Help. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13718

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