Visually exploring player strategies with Pathways, a visual analytics tool.

Candidate: Andre Gagne
Type: Master of Science (MSc), School of Interactive Arts and Technology
Date: August 23, 2011
Senior Supervisor: Dr. Magy Seif el-Nasr
Thesis: Download Thesis Document

Abstract

Games User Research (GUR) is a specialized field of User Experience (UX) focusing on video games.  UX as a research field has existed for many decades and focuses on improving the usability of software and interfaces people interact with.  UX has a variety of methods that have been developed; these range from usability inspection methods where experts evaluate the interface for problems by themselves using a walkthrough (cognitive walkthrough) or heuristics (heuristic analysis) to methods that involve experiments with actual users (e.g., observation studies where users are asked to interact with a software in a lab setting and designers or testers observe their behavior, think aloud protocols where users are asked to interact with a piece of software while speaking aloud what they are thinking, to mention a few). 

GUR researchers have adapted these methods to video games, where usability is not the only issue in question, but rather the issue of ‘fun’ and engagement are of more importance. The question of, “Is it fun?” is more subjective and hence more difficult to measure than standard usability driving the need for better measures of player’s behaviours as well as their emotions.

Gameplay telemetry, or records of events that occurred while the player was playing the game, is growing in popularity.  Gameplay telemetry can gather a complete record of events that occurred while a player plays the game for every player who plays it (tens of thousands to millions of players); any analysis conducted on this data will inherently reflect a larger population (and thus more accurately describe them) than the tens to maybe 100 players that can be observed with observations.  With the massive amount of data that is being recorded, however, comes the problem of analysis: a single researcher can run a limited number of participants in an observation study and still understand the results; millions of player’s data requires new tools to arrive at meaningful conclusions. 

Previous work has focused mostly on creating static visualizations of gameplay telemetry because the visual perception system is one of the highest bandwidth perceptual systems and thus is best suited for finding interesting points or average values in the data.  Static visualizations however, require several visualizations to be made over the course of the analysis process.  Visual analytics creates interactive tools that allow for data to be selected and filtered in real time speeding up the analysis process.  Currently no published work has described a visual analytics system that focuses on the graphical exploration of gameplay data for finding strategies in open world games.

This thesis describes the design and implementation of a visual analytics tool for gameplay telemetry called Pathways. Pathways is developed for game designers and/or producers enabling to explore players’ strategy and behaviour over time, which has not been the focus of previous research. I used Pixel Legions, a free web-based Real Time Strategy game. I present a discussion of analysis of Pixel Legions as a case study to show the use of the system and analysis gained from using the system. The case study demonstrates how the novel features of Pathways can be used in conjunction with Tableau to analyze player behaviours in a semi-open world game.