About
134
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Introduction
Günter is Prof. for Game Computing at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and holds positions at the Eindhoven University of Technology and Ontario Tech University. His work particularly centers on understanding user behavior and on researching methods to explore and communicate the collected data to derive actionable insights for design and development. As part of this, he is working on data visualizations to support the analysis of the increasingly large-scale player behavioral datasets.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
November 2019 - present
October 2018 - March 2020
April 2016 - April 2019
Publications
Publications (134)
As video games are becoming more and more complex and are reaching a broader audience, there is an increasing interest in procedures to analyze player behavior and the impact of design decisions. Game companies traditionally relied on user-testing methods, like playtesting, surveys or videotaping, to obtain player feedback. However, these qualitati...
Understanding how interaction unfolds over time is a key factor for understanding the dynamics aspects of player behavior. Thus far, analysis of sequential patterns of player behavior has, however, mainly focused on discovering frequently recurring patterns. However, frequency of occurrence is not always a reliable indicator of a pattern's importan...
With the rise of competitive online gaming and esports, players’ ability to review, reflect upon, and improve their in-game performance
has become important. Post-play visualizations are key for such improvements. Despite the increased interest in visualizations of
gameplay, research specifically informing the design of player-centric visualization...
Visualizations have become a relevant instrument in games user research and analytics as well as for players to facilitate the analysis of behavioral data, including the evaluation of spatial game metrics. A fundamental task in this respect is to understand how different metrics vary across the game environment and how they relate to each other. In...
With competitive gaming on the rise, players have developed an increased interest in data-driven feedback of their in-game performance. In many cases, this feedback is presented visually post-play but live companions that provide real-time analytics are gaining more and more attention. However, the design of such systems poses different requirement...
As player demand for information about esports games surges, live companion tools were developed to help them understand game-related knowledge, make decisions, and review post-game data. Despite growing interest, little is currently known about how different users perceive and use commercially available apps and their different features. However,...
Navigating is essential in many video games. However, previous work suggests that many games still suffer from navigational problems that decrease enjoyment. In this paper, we focus on "Desire Paths", informal trails collectively created by pedestrians representing the most convenient route. While they are known to be useful wayfinding aids, it is...
Repeated measurements of player experience are crucial in games user research, assessing how different designs evolve over time. However, this necessitates lightweight measurement instruments that are fit for the purpose. In this study, we conduct an examination of the test-retest reliability of the miniPXI -a short variant of the Player Experience...
Repeated measurements of player experience are crucial in games user research, assessing how different designs evolve over time. However, this necessitates lightweight measurement instruments that are fit for the purpose. In this study, we conduct an examination of the test-retest reliability of the \emph{miniPXI} -- a short variant of the \emph{Pl...
With the growth of competitive gaming and esports, training support tools that offer feedback on players' performance to assist in skill development have witnessed increased demand. These tools increasingly not only provide prospective and retrospective analyses but also live feedback during gameplay itself. Thus, such 'live companions' provide ove...
Among the many application areas of eye tracking, games and sports have become an increasingly popular domain for leveraging this technology to 1) build novel experiences for players and sportsmen and 2) to gain a better understanding of players' cognitive processes during gameplay and sports activities. Games and sports pose unique challenges for...
Players increasingly adopt a data-driven approach to review and improve their gaming skills. In the wake of this, spatio-temporal visualizations gained popularity but remain challenging to design. Storyline visualizations are unique in the way they integrate time and location information into a single view to show how entity relationships develop o...
Social change games (SGCs) address a number of issues ranging from poverty and homelessness, to refugee crises and human rights. They strive to function as tools for social justice: capturing differences and inequalities, challenging status quo, and stimulating change. However, little is known about how these games work and what kind of rhetorical...
Live streaming of video games is a new form of entertainment attracting millions of users. A unique combination of broadcasting and chat rooms transforms traditionally passive spectating into a deeper social experience. In this paper, we investigate six interaction mechanics that allow viewers to participate actively and to possibly alter the outco...
With data about in-game behavior becoming more easily accessible, data-driven tools and websites that allow players to review their performance have emerged. Among the many different visualizations used as part of these systems, spatio-temporal visualizations which do not rely on animations have received little attention. In this paper, we explore...
Maps play discerning roles in video games as they serve multiple functions. Amongst others, they support gameplay by communicating information and acting as navigational tools. However, our body of knowledge regarding game maps, while growing, is still limited – especially from a cartographic perspective. In this paper, we contribute a classificati...
Competitive games usually feature some sort of ranking system to rank players or teams based on their performance. As such these ranking systems allow to draw comparisons across players. In many cases, however, the details of the ranking system are not made transparent to the player community. On the other hand, the community may have a different o...
The reporting of esports matches is mostly done via dashboards, which contain the main match stream, as well as additional information about the match. Research has shown that these dashboards should be more adaptable to different user demands. However, little is known about the relative importance of the presented information on the dashboards to...
In this paper, we describe an interactive visualization tool for representing the dynamics of graph algorithms. To reach this goal, we designed a web-based framework which illustrates the dynamics as time-to-space mappings of dynamic graphs. Such static diagrams of dynamic data have the benefit of being able to display longer time spans in one view...
With the rapid growth of information technology and geographic information science, many map-based visualization applications for decision-making have been proposed. These applications are used in various contexts. Our study provides empirical evidence of how domain experts utilize map-based data visualization for generating insights into vitality...
Games have shown to play a pivotal role as a source of entertainment and social interaction during the COVID-19 outbreak, allowing development and maintenance of positive relationships.
Despite the great potential of data platforms to help solve societal issues, the actual usage of data platforms is still limited due to the lack of consideration of socio-technical aspects. To understand requirements from multiple actors on a vitality data platform, semi-structured interviews were conducted with three groups of actors: representati...
Visualizing eye tracking data can provide insights in many research fields. However, visualizing such data efficiently and cost-effectively is challenging without well-designed tools. Easily accessible web-based approaches equipped with intuitive and interactive visualizations offer to be a promising solution. Many of such tools already exist, howe...
This paper describes an interactive visualization tool consisting of several views offering different perspectives on genealogical data that is stored and maintained by the Brabants Historical Information Center (BHIC). The dataset consists of several attributes, static as well as dynamic ones, containing information about several million people ha...
Analyzing evaluation results of usability and user experience studies has its limitations when it comes to personalized user interfaces, highly complex and connected systems, or internationally used services involving millions of users. To support the analysis of the evaluation results of usability and user experience, a task-based evaluation appro...
Analyzing evaluation results of usability and user experience studies has its limitations when it comes to personalized user interfaces, highly complex and connected systems, or internationally used services involving millions of users. To support the analysis of the evaluation results of usability and user experience, a task-based evaluation appro...
There exists a considerable amount of digital games that are described and published in the scientific literature. Among them, there are those considered as “serious games”, whose foremost goal differs from pure entertainment, being conceived mainly for training, capacity building, and education among other ends. Serious digital games for learning...
Data visualization is often used in computer gaming to provide feedback to players. However, little research has investigated its potential in hybrid physical/digital tabletop games, or for tabletop role-playing games. Building upon the benefits of tangible interfaces we introduce and report on the design of the Truesight Battle Grid, a modular, ta...
Video games have shown to promote well-being in various ways. However, they may also have negative effects on the psychological and physical well-being of players. In this work, we are concerned with the latter and present a tangible ambient device aimed at creating awareness about long gaming sessions and encouraging players to take breaks based o...
Understanding how different players experience gameplay is of vital importance in game development to ensure that the games are enjoyable and rewarding for a diverse audience. Since each user research method has its own strengths and weaknesses, one of the key questions for user researchers is to determine which methods to use in their study design...
Bullying can have various negative short and long-term consequences for adolescents. With online technology expanding the occasions for bullying, developing solutions to prevent bullying and cyberbullying has become even more pressing. We have developed two prototypes of educational games to raise awareness of the consequences of bullying among ado...
This CHI PLAY 2020 masterclass offers an introduction into information visualization and how it can assist in the analysis and communication of the wide variety of data gathered in games-related research. The goal is to provide an overview of easy-to-apply visualizations for both quantitative and qualitative data frequently used within the CHI PLAY...
Player motivation is a key research area within games research, with the aim of understanding how the motivation of players is related to their experience and behavior in the game. We present the results of a cross-sectional study with data from 750 players of League of Legends a popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game. Based on the motivation...
The world of online gaming can have a strong emotional impact on children that parents often do not understand or even acknowledge. However, parental understanding can be vital for the emotional development of adolescents. However, conveying emotions can be challenging and thus can benefit from mediators which facilitate parent-child communication....
We see a growing interest in sharing data and a growing desire to give meaning and understanding to data. Data sharing has great potential to promote people’s health and vitality by encouraging collaboration across a variety of parties. Nevertheless, the use of data lags behind due to the lack of consideration of various users’ requirements in desi...
Human playtesting is a useful step in the game development process, but involves high economic costs and is time-consuming. While playtesting through artificial intelligence is gaining attention, it is challenging to analyze the collected data. We address the challenge by proposing visualizations to derive insights about level design in 2D side-scr...
The perception of differences between graphs represented as node-link diagrams is an important issue in many disciplines. This paper presents results from a study with 40 participants. The goal of the study was to test whether shape, density, and edge crossings of the graph influence the perception of differences between graphs and the order in whi...
Player motivation is a key research area within games research, with the aim of understanding how the motivation of players is related to their experience and behavior in the game. We present the results of a cross-sectional study with data from 750 players of League of Legends, a popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game. Based on the motivatio...
Competition and collaboration form complex interaction patterns between the agents and objects involved. Only by understanding these interaction patterns, we can reveal the strategies the participating parties applied. In this paper, we study such competition and collaboration behavior for a computer game. Serving as a testbed for artificial intell...
Game studios aim to develop titles that deliver a fun and engaging experience for players. Playtesting promises to help identify opportunities to improve player experience and assist developers in achieving their design intent. However, a lack of research on the added value of playtesting means that many studios are still uncertain about its commer...
With rapid advances in streaming technology and the rise of esports, spectating other people playing video games has become a mass phenomenon. Today, both live video game streaming and esports are a booming business attracting million of viewers. This offers an opportunity for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research to explore how to support spec...
Playtesting of games often relies on a mixed-methods approach to obtain more holistic insights about and, in turn, improve the player experience. However, triangulating the different data sources and visualizing them in an integrated manner such that they contextualize each other still proves challenging. Despite its potential value for gauging pla...
Making effective use of data generated from players interacting with games (often via playtesting to improve game quality) is a challenging task since the datasets are often mixed and very large. To address this, various visualization techniques have been introduced to help game developers cope with the data. However, there is a gap in research con...
Understanding how players navigate through virtual worlds can offer useful guidance for map and level design of video games. One way to handle large-scale movement data obtained within games is by modelling movement as a sequence of visited locations instead of focusing on raw trajectory data. In this paper, we introduce a visualization approach fo...
Recently, interest in streaming and esports has flourished, placing increased emphasis on the spectator experience. We argue that by escaping the boundaries of the screen and incorporating a physical aspect, another stimulatory and social dimension, which heightens the interaction with the data and positively contributes to spectatorship, can be ad...
Data literacy has become a critical skill to deal with the complexities of the information-driven society of the 21st century. At the same time, data visualization has long escaped the boundaries of science and has become a pervasive - often unrecognized - part of our everyday lives. In this paper, we introduce Diagram Safari, an educational game t...
Visual comparison of graphs has become widespread in various disciplines. To support this task, it is necessary to generate graph drawings that facilitate the perception of differences. However, while readability of single graphs has been widely investigated, knowledge about the recognition of differences in graphs in general and directed acyclic g...
The last decade has witnessed the rise of big data in game development as the increasing proliferation of Internet-enabled gaming devices has made it easier than ever before to collect large amounts of player-related data. At the same time, the emergence of new business models and the diversification of the player base have exposed a broader potent...
So-called battle maps are an appropriate way to visually summarize the flow of battles as they happen in many team-based combat games. Such maps can be a valuable tool for retrospective analysis of battles for the purpose of training or for providing a summary representation for spectators. In this paper an extension to the battle map algorithm pre...
This position papers presents a solution to allow to analyze the impact of automation on user experience by extending a task notation with the concepts of function allocation, authority and representation, and the ability to represent data from user experience evaluations.
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...
Playtesting is a key component in the game development process aimed at improving the quality of games through the collection of gameplay data and identification of design issues. Visualization techniques are currently being employed to help integrate quantitative and qualitative data. Despite that, two existing challenges are to determine the leve...
In this paper we present our vision on how to bring about Systemic Change. We define the system and introduce achieving systemic change as an iterative, data-informed process consisting of four major phases. First, we state that Context Exploration and research in a real-life setting are crucial aspects when modeling and implementing systemic chang...
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...
Planning for transport infrastructure requires forecasting of future travel demand. Various factors such as future population, employment, and the travel behaviour of the residents drive travel demand. In order to better understand human travel behaviour, household travel surveys—which require participants to record all their trips made during a si...
Online gaming has taken on an indispensable role in popular culture and with it interest in understanding all types of player communities - be it directly within or around a game - shifted into the focus of attention of game developers. While research on player networks has proliferated, visualization of these communities and networks has received...
Playful activities are regarded to be a promising way for fostering children's geometric thinking and understanding. In this paper we introduce Lost My Way, an educational game about geometric transformations targeted at middle school children of about 10 years of age. We describe the design of the game and report preliminary results and experience...
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...
During the last decade, game developers and researchers
have started to extensively collect in-game data of
players in order to guide decision-making. This has
led to the emergence of the new field of game analytics,
that is, data analytics in the context of games.1
Over the last years, game analytics has considerably
contributed to our understandi...
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...
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....
Player involvement in the process of game development has become a de-facto standard in both industry and academia. Participation is intended to empower players, while helping designers create better games. However, participation also introduces uncertainty regarding players' and designers' relative roles, and creates new concerns over the exploita...
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...
While visual comparison of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is commonly encountered in various disciplines (e.g., finance, biology), knowledge about humans' perception of graph similarity is currently quite limited. By graph similarity perception we mean how humans perceive commonalities and differences in graphs and herewith come to a similarity jud...
While visual comparison of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) is commonly encountered in various disciplines (e.g., finance, biology), knowledge about humans' perception of graph similarity is currently quite limited. By graph similarity perception we mean how humans perceive commonalities and differences in graphs and herewith come to a similarity jud...
With the advent of online gaming, access to in-game data has become increasingly important for players as it provides great opportunities for them to reflect and improve upon their gameplay or to compare their performance with others. Some of the currently most popular games focus on strategy and tactics, requiring players to skillfully position an...
Team-based combat games rank among the most popular genres of online games. Their competitive and skill-based gameplay requires players to develop new and constantly refine existing skills in order to succeed and stay ahead of the game. Players of such games are thus showing increased interest in training visualizations which allow them to review t...
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...
Educational games have started to establish themselves as a fruitful complement to traditional teaching methods since they can enhance motivation and actively engage learners with the subject matter. While educational games targeted toward single players still prevail, recent years have also witnessed a growing interest to incorporate collaborative...
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th InternationalConference on Entertainment Computing, ICEC 2016, held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2016.
The 16 full papers, 13 short papers, and 2 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. The multidisciplinary nature of entertainment computing is reflec...
Visualizing time-dependent and location-based data is a challenging problem but highly relevant for areas like intelligence analysis, traffic control, or social network analysis. In this context, we address the problem of visualizing meetings between persons, groups of persons, vehicles, or other entities. However, the temporal dimension inherent i...
The investigation of how users make sense of the data provided by information systems is very important for Human Computer Interaction. In this context, understanding the interaction processes of users plays an important role. The analysis of interaction sequences, for example, can provide a deeper understanding about how users solve problems. In t...
In both industry and academia, software tools are essential for games user research (GUR) in order to collect, integrate, analyze and report on games and players' data. GUR datasets are becoming more and more complex, detailed and multifaceted. Hence, tools are necessary to efficiently handle data. This one-day workshop explores the vast spectrum o...
Finding differences between two processes can be a complex, time consuming, and expensive task. Our work is based on the difference graph approach which calculates the differences between two process models and – if available – their instances. In this paper we evaluate different possibilities for visualizing these differences. For this purpose we...
The analysis of differences and commonalities between process models or between instances which progressed through the model (henceforth referred to as instance traffic) plays an important role in companies. For example, companies are often confronted with different versions or variants of a process model and hence need methods to identify redundan...
Telemetry opens new possibilities for the assessment of serious games through the continuous, unobtrusive, monitoring of in-game behavior. Data obtained through telemetry thus not only contains information about the outcomes but also about the intermediate processes. In this sense, telemetry data can be of value for various stakeholders of serious...
The prevalence of internet-enabled gaming devices nowadays enables game developers to remotely and unobtrusively monitor every aspect of a game, allowing them to accumulate large amounts of data of the player-game interaction over extended time periods. This data has become a viable source for developers to guide decision-making throughout the game...
