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The Ludic Potentials of Player Data
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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 visualizations is currently limited. As with all visualizations,
their design should, however, be guided by a thorough understanding of the goals to be achieved and which information is important
and why.
This paper reports on a mixed-methods study exploring the information demands posed by players on post-play visualizations and
the goals they pursue with such visualizations. We focused on three genres that enjoy great popularity within the competitive gaming
scene. Our results provide useful guideposts on which data to focus on by offering an overview of the relevance of different in-game
metrics across genres. Lastly, we outline high-level implications for the design of post-play visualizations.
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. In this position paper we discuss the current state of the field and argue that there is a need for further research into how players use their data and what they want from data-driven systems. We argue that such knowledge would be invaluable to better design data-driven systems that can aid players in gaining expertise and mastering gameplay.
Over the past several years, the live-streaming of digital games has experienced a vast increase in popularity, coinciding with the rise of eSports as an entertainment medium. For a rapidly growing audience, streamed content provides material from an ever-increasing roster of games, tournaments, and special events. Recently, streaming platforms, game developers, and professional players have experimented with the inclusion of viewer interaction through mechanisms such as chat, broadcast messages, donations, and voting systems. With the advent of these mechanisms, the concept of game viewership has entered a transitory period; while still largely focused on consumption, for many spectators, the viewing experience is no longer an entirely passive act. The idea of interactive spectatorship (the authors refer to it as Spectator-players) carries the potential for audience members to engage with content at a much deeper level, participating actively in a novel form of entertainment and contributing to an enriched gaming community. This novel form of gaming interaction poses interesting challenges for game designers, as it requires design considerations to meet the needs of players, passive viewers, and active audience members alike. In this paper, the authors examine the opportunities and challenges presented by the design of interactive spectator experiences. Ultimately, they propose a series of design guidelines aimed at the exploration of development in the area of interactive spectator experiences.
Audience Participation Games challenge traditional assumptions about gameplay by blurring the line between audience and player, allowing audience members to impact gameplay in a meaningful way. Their recent rise in popularity has created new opportunities for game research and development. To better understand this design space, we developed several versions of two prototype games as design probes. We livestreamed them to an online audience in order to develop a framework for audience motivations and participation styles, to explore ways in which mechanics can affect audience members' sense of agency, and to identify promising design spaces. Our results show the breadth of opportunities and challenges that designers face in creating engaging Audience Participation Games.
Conventional wisdom suggests that while players enjoy unpredictability or novelty during gameplay experiences, they will feel "cheated" if games are adjusted during or across play sessions. In order for adjustment to be effective, it must be performed without disrupting or degrading the core player experience. This paper examines basic design requirements for effective dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) given this constraint, presents an interactive DDA system (Hamlet), and offers preliminary evaluation results which challenge common assumptions about player enjoyment and adjustment dynamics.
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 for movement analysis based on semantic trajectories derived from a user-guided segmentation of the game environment. Based on this concept, the visualization offers an aggregated view of movement patterns together with the possibility to view individual paths for detailed inspection. We report on a user study with six experts from the game industry and compare the insights they have gleaned from the visualization with feedback from players. Our results indicate that the approach is successful in localizing problematic areas and that semantic trajectories can be a valuable addition to existing approaches for player movement analysis.
Developing a profitable game in today’s market is a challenging endeavor. Thousands of commercial titles are published yearly, across a number of hardware platforms and distribution channels, all competing for players’ time and attention, and the game industry is decidedly competitive. In order to effectively develop games, a variety of tools and techniques from e.g. business practices, project management to user testing have been developed in the game industry, or adopted and adapted from other IT sectors. One of these methods is analytics, which in recent years has decidedly impacted on the game industry and game research environment.
Agency has long been considered one of the core pleasures of interacting with digital games. Recent treatments of agency in games culture and game design have grown increasingly concerned with providing the player with limitless freedom to act. While this describes one form of pleasure, in narratively focused games it has the unfortunate consequence of pitting the agency of the player against the will of the designer. We contend that for narrative games it is valuable to refocus our definitions of agency on the notion of meaning, and propose a treatment of agency that emphasises communicative commitments. This form of agency draws on ideas from speech act theory, and relies on a degree of ‘communicative competence’ on the part of both the game designer and player in order to function. We discuss mechanisms for training players in the necessary literacies needed to commit to meanings in games, and provide an example analysis of a game that successfully accomplishes this task.
Game Analytics - Maximizing the Value of Player Data
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