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A spatiotemporal visualization approach for the analysis of gameplay data

Published: 05 May 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Contemporary video games are highly complex systems with many interacting variables. To make sure that a game provides a satisfying experience, a meaningful analysis of gameplay data is crucial, particularly because the quality of a game directly relates to the experience a user gains from playing it. Automatic instrumentation techniques are increasingly used to record data during playtests. However, the evaluation of the data requires strong analytical skills and experience. The visualization of such gameplay data is essentially an information visualization problem, where a large number of variables have to be displayed in a comprehensible way in order to be able to make global judgments. This paper presents a visualization tool to assist the analytical process. It visualizes the game space as a set of nodes which players visit over the course of a game and is also suitable to observe time-dependent information, such as player distribution. Our tool is not tailored to a specific type of genre. To show the flexibility of our approach we use two different kinds of games as case studies.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '12: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      May 2012
      3276 pages
      ISBN:9781450310154
      DOI:10.1145/2207676
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 05 May 2012

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      Author Tags

      1. clustering
      2. gameplay visualization
      3. player behavior
      4. playtesting
      5. time-dependent visualization

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      • (2024)Real-Time Gameplay Data and Biometric Measurement Integration as a Data Source for Game User ResearchDigital Interaction and Machine Intelligence10.1007/978-3-031-66594-3_15(144-156)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2024
      • (2023)Game-based assessment framework for virtual reality, augmented reality and digital game-based learningInternational Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education10.1186/s41239-023-00405-620:1Online publication date: 23-Jun-2023
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