Anders Drachen

The University of York · DC Labs & Computer Science

User-behaviour analysis has only recently been adapted to the context of the virtual world domain and remains limited in its application. Behaviour analysis is based on instrumentation data, automated, detailed, quantitative information about user behaviour within the virtual environment (VE) of digital games. A key advantage of the method in compa...

We present a study focused on constructing models of players for the major commercial title Tomb Raider: Underworld (TRU). Emergent self-organizing maps are trained on high-level playing behavior data obtained from 1365 players that completed the TRU game. The unsupervised learning approach utilized reveals four types of players which are analyzed...

Incentive salience attribution can be understood as a psychobiological process ascribing relevance to potentially rewarding objects and actions. Despite being an important component of the motivational process guiding our everyday behaviour its study in naturalistic contexts is not straightforward. Here we propose a methodology based on artificial...

Work in AI-based explanation systems has uncovered an interesting contradiction: people prefer and learn best from 'why' explanations but expert esports commentators primarily answer 'what' questions when explaining complex behavior in real-time strategy games. Three possible explanations for this contradiction are: 1.) broadcast audiences are well...

Teamwork is challenging in cooperative digital games, especially between strangers. In many online cooperative games, teams have a short-lived existence and ever-changing membership. Our study explores how short-lived, ad hoc teams of strangers communicate and investigate its effect on team performance. We use the commercial cooperative digital gam...

Unlike traditional physical sports, Esport games are played using wholly digital platforms. As a consequence, there exists rich data (in-game, audio and video) about the events that take place in matches. These data offer viable linguistic resources for generating comprehensible text descriptions of matches, which could, be used as the basis of nov...

In social and online media, influencers have traditionally been understood as highly visible individuals. Recent outcomes suggest that people are likely to mimic influencers' behavior, which can be exploited, for instance, in marketing strategies. Also in the Games User Research field, the interest in studying player social networks has emerged due...

Multiplayer strategy games are examples of imperfect information games, where information about the game state can be retrieved through in-game mechanics. One such mechanic is vision. Within esports titles of this genre, such as League of Legends (LoL) and Dota 2, players often gather map information through the use of friendly units called wards....

Multiplayer strategy games are examples of imperfect information games, where information about the game state can be retrieved through in-game mechanics. One such mechanic is vision. Within esports titles of this genre, such as League of Legends (LoL) and Dota 2, players often gather map information through the use of friendly units called wards....

Open world video games are designed to offer free-roaming virtual environments and agency to the players, providing a substantial degree of freedom to play the games in the way the individual player prefers. Open world games are typically either persistent, or for single-player versions semi-persistent, meaning that they can be played for long peri...

In social and online media, influencers have traditionally been understood as highly visible individuals. Recent outcomes suggest that people are likely to mimic influencers' behavior, which can be exploited, for instance, in marketing strategies. Also in the Games User Research field, the interest in studying player social networks has emerged due...

Engagement is a fuzzy concept. In the present work we operationalize engagement mechanistically by linking it directly to human behaviour and show that the construct of engagement can be used for shaping and interpreting data-driven methods. First we outline a formal framework for engagement modelling. Second we expanded on our previous work on the...

Engagement is a fuzzy concept. In the present work we operationalize engagement mechanistically by linking it directly to human behaviour and show that the construct of engagement can be used for shaping and interpreting data-driven methods. First we outline a formal framework for engagement modelling. Second we expanded on our previous work on the...

Esports(competitivevideogames)havegrownintoaglobalphenomenon with over 450m viewers and a 1.5bn USD market. Esports broadcasts follow a similar structure to traditional sports. However, due to their virtual nature, a large and detailed amount data is available about in-game actions not currently accessible in traditional sport. This provides an opp...

Open world video games are designed to offer free-roaming virtual environments and agency to the players, providing a substantial degree of freedom to play the games in the way the individual player prefers. Open world games are typically either persistent, or for single-player versions semi-persistent, meaning that they can be played for long peri...

Ethereum crypto-games are a booming and relatively unexplored area of the games industry. While there is no consensus definition yet, 'crypto-games' commonly denotes games that store tokens, e.g. in-game items, on a distributed ledger atop a cryptocurrency network. This enables the trading of game items for cryptocurrency, which can then be exchang...

Esports are competitive videogames watched by audiences. Most esports generate detailed data for each match that are publicly available. Esports analytics research is focused on predicting match outcomes. Previous research has emphasised pre-match prediction and used data from amateur games, which are more easily available than professional level....

Behavioral profiling of players in digital games is a key challenge in game analytics, representing a particular challenge in Open-World Games. These games are characterized by large virtual worlds and few restrictions on player affordances. In these games, incorporating the spatial and temporal dimensions of player behavior is necessary when profi...

Social media has become a major communication channel for communities centered around video games. Consequently, social media offers a rich data source to study online communities and the discussions evolving around games. Towards this end, we explore a large-scale dataset consisting of over 1 million tweets related to the online multiplayer shoote...

Data-driven approaches which aim to identify and predict player engagement are becoming increasingly popular in games industry contexts. This is due to the growing practice of tracking and storing large volumes of in-game telemetries coupled with a desire to tailor the gaming experience to the end-user's needs. These approaches are particularly use...

Esports have become major international sports with hundreds of millions of spectators. Esports games generate massive amounts of telemetry data. Using these to predict the outcome of esports matches has received considerable attention, but micro-predictions, which seek to predict events inside a match, is as yet unknown territory. Micro-prediction...

In a wide range of social networks, people's behavior is influenced by social contagion: we do what our network does. Networks often feature particularly influential individuals, commonly called "influencers." Existing work suggests that in-game social networks in online games are similar to real-life social networks in many respects. However, we d...

This course will allow participants to understand the complexities of games user research methods for user experience research in games. For this, we have put together three-course sessions at CHI (80 minutes each) on applications of different user research methods in games evaluation and playtesting exercises to help participants turn player feedb...

Modern Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs) have grown to become extremely complex in terms of the usable resources in the games, resulting in an increase in the amount of data collected by tracking the in-game activities of players. This has opened the door for researchers to come up with novel methods to utilize this data to improve and pe...

Engagement and player experience in multi-player games is influenced by the people you play with. For that reason, grouping features and matchmaking facilities in games, as well as third-party services, have gained in popularity in the industry and player community as they assist in building and maintaining social relationships with like-minded pla...

This paper presents an architecture for the creation of emotionally congruent music using machine learning aided sound synthesis. Our system can generate a small corpus of music using Hidden Markov Models; we can label the pieces with emotional tags using data elicited from questionnaires. This produces a corpus of labelled music underpinned by per...

This hybrid course will allow participants to understand the complexities of games user research methods. For this we have put together 4 sessions (2 hours each, 8 hours total) of content on applications on different user research methods in games evaluation to help participants turn player feedback into actionable design recommendations. The cours...

Social features, matchmaking, and grouping functions are key elements of online multi-player experiences. Understanding how social connections form in and around games and their relationship to in-game activity offers insights for building and maintaining player bases and for improving engagement and retention. This paper presents an analysis of th...

Esports - video games played competitively that are broadcast to large audiences - are a rapidly growing new form of mainstream entertainment. Esports borrow from traditional TV, but are a qualitatively different genre, due to the high flexibility of content capture and availability of detailed gameplay data. Indeed, in esports, there is access to...

Cambridge Core - Computing and Society - Social Interactions in Virtual Worlds - edited by Kiran Lakkaraju

Social Interactions in Virtual Worlds - edited by Kiran Lakkaraju July 2018

In recent years, microblogging platforms have not only become an important communication channel for the game industry to generate and uphold audience interest but also a rich resource for gauging player opinion. In this paper we use data gathered from Twitter to examine which topics matter to players and to identify influential members of a game's...

Game jamming is a valuable tool and process to connect game developers from a range of disciplines such as art, programming, audio engineering, or story-telling. The Global Game Jam® (GGJ) thus fundamentally supports the process of connecting people, and forms a basis for studying teamwork formation and -mechanics. It is an annual event, where part...

Multi-player online esports games are designed for extended durations of play, requiring substantial experience to master. Furthermore, esports game revenues are increasingly driven by in-game purchases. For esports companies, the trends in players leaving their games therefore not only provide information about potential problems in the user exper...

Mobile games make up the largest segment of the games industry, in terms of revenue as well as players. Hundreds of thousands of games are available with most being free to download and play. In freemium games, revenue is predominantly generated by users making in-game purchases. As only a small fraction of users make purchases, predicting these us...

Compared to conventional retail games, today's Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have become progressively more complex and volatile, living in a highly competitive market. Consumable resources in such games are nearly unlimited, making decisions to improve levels of engagement more challenging. Intelligent information filtering methods he...

Today, Games User Research forms an integral component of the development of any kind of interactive entertainment. User research stands as the primary source of business intelligence in the incredibly competitive game industry. This book aims to provide the foundational, accessible, go-to resource for people interested in GUR. It is a community-dr...

The aim of this document is to present the implementation of the educational scenarios and an evaluation report for the delivered components within ENVISAGE. The deliverable reports on the results obtained during the execution of the implemented educational scenarios. The evaluation process focused on the three separate elements of the project 1) t...

Destiny is a hybrid online shooter sharing features with Massively Multi-Player Online Games and first-person shooters and is the to date the most expensive digital game produced. It has attracted millions of players to compete or collaborate within a persistent online environment. In multiplayer online games, the interaction between the players an...

Esports has emerged as a popular genre for players as well as spectators, supporting a global entertainment industry. Esports analytics has evolved to address the requirement for data-driven feedback, and is focused on cyber-athlete evaluation, strategy and prediction. Towards the latter, previous work has used match data from a variety of player r...

Hundreds of millions of people play intellectually-demanding video games every day. What does individual performance on these games tell us about cognition? Here, we describe two studies that examine the potential link between intelligence and performance in one of the most popular video games genres in the world (Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas:...

Analysis of variance. (PDF)

Data pre-processing. (PDF)

Confirmatory factor analysis. (PDF)

Advert and recruitment. (PDF)

Identifying player motivations such as curiosity could help game designers analyze player profiles and substantially improve game design. However, research on player profiling focuses on generalized personality traits, not specific aspects of motivation. This study examines how player behaviour indicates constructs of curiosity-related motivation....

The first few minutes of play, commonly referred to as the onboarding phase, of Free-to-Play mobile games typically display a substantial churn rate among new players. It is therefore vital for designers to effectively evaluate this phase to investigate its satisfaction of player expectations. This paper presents a study utilizing a lab-based mixed...

Competitive multi-player game play is a common feature in major commercial titles, and has formed the foundation for esports. In this paper, the question whether it is possible to predict match outcomes in First Person Shooter-type multi-player competitive games with mixed genres is addressed. The case employed is Destiny, which forms a hybrid titl...

The present study tests a recently proposed model in which social video game play supports wellbeing by contributing to a harmonious type of engagement with the game. Players (N = 2030) of the online-only multiplayer first-person shooter game, Destiny, reported the frequency they played with real-life friends, online-only friends and strangers, the...

Using data from a major commercial online game, Destiny, we track the development of player skill across time. From over 20,000 player record we identify 3475 players who have played on 50 or more days. Our focus is on how variability in elements of play affect subsequent skill development. After validating the persistent influence of differences i...

Social gaming is today a pervasive phenomenon. Driven by the advent of social networks and the digitization of game distribution. In this paper the impact of digitization and so-cial networks such as Facebook on digital games is de-scribed and evaluated. This impact follows several vectors, including the introduction of new game formats and extend-...

Behavioral profiling in digital games with persistent online worlds are vital for a variety of tasks ranging from understanding the player community to informing design and business decisions. In this paper behavioral profiles are developed for the online multiplayer shooter/role-playing game Destiny, the most expensive game to be launched to date...

Social Gaming is a pervasive phenomenon, driven by the advent of social networks and the digitization of game distribution. This paper positions and defines Casual Social Games (CSGs) as a genre and platform agnostic subset of Social Games that incorporates browser, mobile, console and wearable digital games. The authors argue that – as CSGs impact...

The availability of large scale game behavioral data has led to a tremendous amount of attention to business intelligence in game development and-research. The analysis of player behavior has rapidly emerged to become an integrated component of game development, and is used to address a range of challenges such as improving game design, manage mone...

Major commercial (AAA) games increasingly transit to a semi-persistent or persistent format in order to extend the value of the game to the player, and to add new sources of revenue beyond basic retail sales. Given this shift in the design of AAA titles, game analytics needs to address new types of problems, notably the problem of forecasting futur...

Evaluating progression of players in a game can take a variety of forms, but ideally combines playstyle or performance analysis with one or more aspects of progression, e.g. through a level-or mission-based structure. Furthermore, visualization of the results of analysis are essential to ensure that action can be taken on them. In this paper behavi...

The onboarding phase of Free-to-Play mobile games, covering the first few minutes of play, typically sees a substantial retention rate among the players. It is therefore crucial to the success of these games that the onboarding phase promotes engagement to the widest degree possible. In this paper a set of heuristics for the design of onboarding ph...

In this paper two key venues of investigation in game an-alytics are combined: behavioral profiling and social network analysis. Both venues of research are well developed but combined they permit pattern evaluation across player performance and networks. Here, competitive networks covering almost 3.5 million players of the hybrid online shooter ga...

Destiny is, to date, the most expensive digital game ever released with a total operating budget of over half a billion US dollars. It stands as one of the main examples of AAA titles, the term used for the largest and most heavily marketed game productions in the games industry. Destiny is a blend of a shooter game and massively multi-player onlin...

Predicting and improving player retention is crucial to the success of mobile Free-to-Play games. This paper explores the problem of rapid retention prediction in this context. Heuristic modeling approaches are introduced as a way of building simple rules for predicting short-term retention. Compared to common classification algorithms, our heurist...

The Games User Research (GUR) community has thrived at CHI with four workshops and a course since CHI 2012; all of these were well attended. In line with the #chi4good spirit this year, the GUR field must advance towards demographics that will benefit from GUR but are currently underrepresented in the community: Small, independent developers, non-p...

Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games are among the most played digital games in the world. In these games, teams of players fight against each other in arena environments, and the gameplay is focused on tactical combat. Mastering MOBAs requires extensive practice, as is exemplified in the popular MOBA Defence of the Ancients 2 (DotA 2). In...

Esports is computer games played in a competitive environment, and analytics in this domain is focused on player and team behavior. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games are among the most played digital games in the world. In these games, teams of players fight against each other in enclosed arena environments, with a complex gameplay focus...

Recent years have seen a deluge of behavioral data from players hitting the game industry. Reasons for this data surge are many and include the introduction of new business models, technical innovations, the popularity of online games, and the increasing persistence of games. Irrespective of the causes, the proliferation of behavioral data poses th...

The articles in this special section ddress various flavors of the diverse field of game analytics. It covers topics ranging from player profiling, behavioral prediction, metrics extraction from gameplay recordings, behavioral analysis, retention analysis, and more.