Magy Seif El-Nasr

University of California, Santa Cruz | UCSC · Computational Media

Self-reflection, a process consisting of evaluation, attribution, and adaptation, is recognized as key to learning in esports games. To better facilitate self-reflection, many games and third-party tools feature retrospective visualizations that provide players with details about their performance. However, previous work suggested that existing vis...

Today's videogames are often intertwined with profound religious narratives, content, characters, and artifacts - but how do player communities understand the role of religion in games, and what is the impression of believers on the use, portrayal, and representation of the religion they practice? This paper dives deep into this confluence by rigor...

Info Overload is a minigame within a larger collection aimed at increasing awareness and preparation for an evacuation in the event of a wildfire. The game relies on experiential two-player cooperative gameplay and is played on a mobile device (a phone or tablet).

Balancing is, especially among players, a highly debated topic of video games. Whether a game is sufficiently balanced greatly influences its reception, player satisfaction, churn rates and success. Yet, conceptions about the definition of balance diverge across industry, academia and players, and different understandings of designing balance can l...

The concept of dealing damage is established and widespread in video games. With growing complexity and countless interactions in modern games, capturing how damage unfolds becomes an intricate problem - for developers just as for players. Misunderstanding how to optimize damage potentials includes risks of game imbalances, game-breaking exploits,...

Serious games can be a valuable addition to the resources available for increasing community resilience in the face of disaster. The purpose of this project is to work closely with two communities at risk of wildfire to design and develop a serious game that can be used by experts and leaders within those communities as part of their holistic appro...

The objective of this paper is to explore potential associations between development teams and the characteristics of the games they produce. Through a production study of Danish game companies and a design analysis of their games, we propose that there are statistically significant associations between features of the game and the team that produc...

Video game balancing is a controversial and highly debated topic, especially between players of online games. Whether a game is sufficiently balanced greatly influences its reception, satisfaction, churn rates and success. In particular, different ideologies of balance can lead to worse player experiences than actual imbalances. This work succeeds...

Individual differences in personality determine our preferences, traits and values, which should similarly hold for the way we express ourselves. With current advancements and transformations of technology and society, text-based communication has become ordinary and often even surpasses natural voice conversations - with distinct challenges and op...

Developing a thorough understanding of the target audience (and/or single individuals) is a key factor for success - which is exceptionally important and powerful for the domain of video games that can not only benefit from informed decision making during development, but ideally even tailor game content, difficulty and player experience while play...

Balancing is, especially among players, a highly debated topic of video games. Whether a game is sufficiently balanced greatly influences its reception, player satisfaction, churn rates and success. Yet, conceptions about the definition of balance diverge across industry, academia and players, and different understandings of designing balance can l...

Video game analytics are widely adopted within academia and industrial development – yet, the player’s perspective is rarely considered as a driving factor, even though vast communities are interested in self-regulated learning, cross-comparisons and empirical trends or insights. In this work, we propose to empower the role of the player as the cen...

Anthropology, defined as the scientific study of human development and societies, can play a critical role in the design of (video) game mechanics and aesthetics. Especially religion and culture are seen as fundamental components in building communities, societies, and human evolution. In this paper, we present (1) a case study using UX methods suc...

Failure and resilience are important aspects of gameplay. This is especially important for serious and competitive games, where players need to adapt and cope with failure frequently. In such situations, emotion regulation -- the active process of modulating ones' emotions to cope and adapt to challenging situations -- becomes essential. It is one...

The papers in this special section focus on user experiences of artificial intelligence in games.

Questionnaires are vital in games user research (GUR) to assess player experience (PX). However, having too many questions in surveys prevents wider uptake among GUR professionals because of games' rapid production cycles. To address this issue, we present the miniPXI---an eleven-item measure of the popular Player Experience Inventory (PXI)---provi...

Computational support for learning in the domain of esports has seen a great deal of attention in recent years as an effective means of helping players learn and reap the benefits of play. However, previous work has not examined the tools from a learning theory perspective to assess if learning is prompted and supported in the right place and time....

Game designers often refer to sources of inspiration for creating new characters and narratives, with cultural and mythological references being a prominent choice for orientation. This however implicitly entails the importance of preventing the misuse of mythological or religious references to respect affiliated groups and believers. In this paper...

Player-facing, retrospective gameplay visualizations help players track progress and learn from others. Visualizations of a user’s step by step process, may be able to advance retrospective visualization. However, we currently do not know how players make meaning from process visualizations of game data. In this work, we take a first step towards a...

What strategies, company organisations, and design decisions render video game titles successful and secure the survivability of a game development studio? These are important questions, subject to situational and contextual variation. Nevertheless, different approaches clearly make a major impact on the public reception or economical outcome of a...

Game designers often refer to sources of inspiration for creating new characters and narratives, with cultural and mythological references being a prominent choice for orientation. This however implicitly entails the importance of preventing the misuse of mythological or religious references to respect affiliated groups and believers. In this paper...

To assist game developers in crafting game NPCs, we present EvolvingBehavior, a novel tool for genetic programming to evolve behavior trees in Unreal Engine 4. In an initial evaluation, we compare evolved behavior to hand-crafted trees designed by our researchers, and to randomly-grown trees, in a 3D survival game. We find that EvolvingBehavior is...

Educational technology is shifting toward facilitating personalized learning. Such personalization, however, requires a detailed understanding of students’ problem-solving processes. Sequence analysis (SA) is a promising approach to gaining granular insights into student problem solving; however, existing techniques are difficult to interpret becau...

Games have been used to study psychological phenomena in the past. Further, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) have also been discussed as great platforms to study psychological constructs such as team dynamics, social communication or coordination, personality, and emotions. In this paper, we introduce a new ARG we developed called LUX. LUX is develop...

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is a form of learning guided by the student's own meta-cognition, motivation, and strategic action, often in the absence of an educator. The use of SRL processes and skills has been demonstrated across numerous academic and non-academic contexts including athletics. However, manifestation of these processes within espo...

This chapter discusses different clustering methods and their application to game data. In particular, the chapter details K-means, Fuzzy C-Means, Hierarchical Clustering, Archetypical Analysis, and Model-based clustering techniques. It discusses the disadvantages and advantages of the different methods and discusses when you may use one method vs....

This chapter introduces the basics of statistics and probability theory that will be used throughout the book. Specifically, it introduces the concepts behind descriptive statistics, including aspects of using visualization of means, medians, and modes, as well as distribution visualizations to understand your data for further analysis. It also int...

This book is aimed at giving readers an introduction to the practical side of game data science and thus can be used a textbook for game analytics or game user research class or as a reference to self learners and enthusiasts. Game data science is a term that we use to denote a process composed of methods and techniques by which an analyst or a dat...

This chapter discusses Social Network Analysis, a technique used to analyze social networks within social games as a method to enhance retention in games. We will show how one can use this method by applying it to the problem of retention within the game Tom Clancy’s The Division ( TCTD ). Using the game and the analysis will help you understand ho...

This chapter introduces the techniques used to abstract the data from low-level data to features that can be used to visualize and develop models to inform the different stakeholders. These techniques range from (a) knowledge engineering, where expert knowledge is used to develop formulae to compute various measures from low-level data; (b) feature...

This chapter discusses more advanced methods for sequence analysis. These include: probabilistic methods using classical planning, Bayesian Networks (BN), Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs), Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), Markov Logic Networks (MLNs), Markov Decision Process (MDP), and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), specifically concentrating on LST...

This chapter focuses on the process of cleaning data and preparing it for further processing. Specifically, the chapter discusses various techniques that you will use, including preprocessing, outlier identification, data consistency, and the normalization or standardization process, used to normalize your data. The chapter further discusses differ...

This chapter introduces the topic of this book: Game Data Science. Game data science is the process of developing data-driven techniques and evidence to support decision-making across operational, tactical, and strategic levels of game development, and this is why it is so valuable. This chapter introduces this topic as well as outlines the process...

This chapter will introduce the use of Neural Networks (NN) in game data science. Due to the availability of game data and the increase in computational power, the use of NNs and deep networks is on the rise in data science in general, and specifically within the field of game data science. Complex deep networks are used as they can generalize to h...

This chapter discusses several classification and regression methods that can be used with game data. Specifically, we will discuss regression methods , including Linear Regression , and classification methods, including K-Nearest Neighbor, Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Linear Discriminant Analysis, Support Vector Machines, Decisions Trees , an...

This chapter discusses the topic of how one can use visualization techniques to analyze game data. Specifically, the chapter delves into the development of heatmaps to analyze spatio-temporal data. The chapter also discusses spatio-temporal visualizations and state-action transition visualizations. We also discuss two visualization systems that we...

This chapter focuses on two specific steps in the machine learning process, called model validation and model evaluation. Specifically, model validation is the step used to tune the hyperparameters of the model. Here, we often integrate a cross-validation process, which we discuss in detail in this chapter. Model evaluation, on the other hand, is t...

This chapter is devoted to sequence game data analysis. It will first define what sequence data is and how it is represented, and then delve more deeply into how to develop models from such data. Sequence analysis has a lot of utility and is important as it conserves the sequence of player actions and can shed light on how players solved different...

This chapter summarizes the takeaways from the different chapters of this book on the game data science process we introduced in Chapter 1. It shares some notes and experiences that can help you when embarking on using the methods discussed in this book. As a conclusion chapter, it will also delve into important topics that are not discussed in oth...

This book is aimed at giving readers an introduction to the practical side of game data science and thus can be used a textbook for game analytics or game user research class or as a reference to self learners and enthusiasts. Game data science is a term that we use to denote a process composed of methods and techniques by which an analyst or a dat...

Data is becoming an important central point for making design decisions for most software. Game development is not an exception. As data-driven methods and systems start to populate these environments, a good question is: can we make models developed from this data transparent to users? In this paper, we synthesize existing work from the Intelligen...

Currently, there is no formal taxonomy for the activities that users engage in when interacting with and making meaning from spatio-temporal game data visualizations. As data visualization, especially spatio-temporal visualization, becomes more popular for game data analytics, it becomes increasingly crucial that we develop a formal understanding o...

Game AI systems need the theory of mind, which is the humanistic ability to infer others' mental models, preferences, and intent. Such systems would enable inferring players' behavior tendencies that contribute to the variations in their decision-making behaviors. To that end, in this paper, we propose the use of inverse Bayesian inference to infer...

We study the problem of simultaneously recognizing complex individual and group activities from spatiotemporal data in games. Recognizing complex player activities is particularly important to understand game dynamics and user behavior having a wide range of applications in game development. To do so, we propose a novel framework by developing a hi...

AI technologies are enabling the development of not only active tools that provide decision-support, but also interactive tools that seek human input and feedback. As interactive tools facilitate human-AI interaction, their design needs to be informed by human-centric requirements, that is, the needs of the users of such tools. In the context of en...

Game AI designers must manage complex interactions between the AI character, the game world, and the player, while achieving their design visions. Computational co-creativity tools can aid them, but first, AI and HCI researchers must gather requirements and determine design heuristics to build effective co-creative tools. In this work, we present a...

Game AI systems need the theory of mind, which is the humanistic ability to infer others' mental models, preferences, and intent. Such systems would enable inferring players' behavior tendencies that contribute to the variations in their decision-making behaviors. To that end, in this paper, we propose the use of inverse Bayesian inference to infer...

Outcome-driven studies designed to evaluate potential effects of games and apps designed to promote healthy eating and exercising remain limited either targeting design or usability factors while omitting out health-based outcomes altogether, or tend to be too narrowly focuses on behavioral outcomes within a short periods of time thereby less likel...

Pervasive health games have a potential to impact health-related behaviors. And, similar to other types of interventions, engagement and adherence in health games is the keystone for examining their short- and long-term effects. Many health-based applications have turned to gamification principles specifically to. enhance their engagement. However,...

Understanding player strategies is a key question when analyzing player behavior both for academic researchers and industry practitioners. For game designers and game user researchers, it is important to gauge the distance between intended strategies and emergent strategies; this comparison allows identification of glitches or undesirable behaviors...

While work in fields of CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work), Psychology and Social Sciences have progressed our understanding of team processes and their effect performance and effectiveness, current methods rely on observations or self-report, with little work directed towards studying team processes with quantifiable measures based on be...

Physical activity (PA) is crucial for reducing the risk of obe- sity, an epidemic that disproportionately burdens families of low- socioeconomic status (SES). While fitness tracking tools can in- crease PA awareness, more work is needed to examine (1) how such tools can help people benefit from their social environment, and (2) how reflections can...

AI technologies are enabling the development of not only active tools that provide decision-support, but also interactive tools that seek human input and feedback. As interactive tools facilitate human-AI interaction, their design needs to be informed by human-centric requirements, that is, the needs of the users of such tools. In the context of en...

The rapid increase in the availability of player data and the advancement of player modeling technologies have resulted in an abundance of data-driven systems for the domain of esports, both within academia and the industry. However, there is a notable lack of research exploring how players use their data to gain expertise in the context of esports...

The role of AI in esports is shifting from leveraging games as a testbed for improving AI algorithms to addressing the needs of the esports players such as enhancing their gaming experience, esports skills, and providing coaching. For AI to be able to effectively address such needs in esports, AI agents require a theory of mind, that is, the abilit...

Searching for relative mobile user interface (UI) design examples can aid interface designers in gaining inspiration and comparing design alternatives. However, finding such design examples is challenging, especially as current search systems rely on only text-based queries and do not consider the UI structure and content into account. This paper i...