G-Player: Exploratory Visual Analytics for Accessible Knowledge Discovery

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Canossa Alessandro Nguyen Truong-Huy D. Seif El-Nasr Magy
2016 DiGRA/FDG '16 - Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG

Understanding player behavior and making sense of gameplay actions is a non-trivial and time-consuming process that requires both thorough domain knowledge of game design, and advanced technical skills in database query languages and statistical packages. Researchers, technology partners and content creators are developing tools to aid in the process of knowledge discovery to gain insights and understanding player behavior. This is important for game production, as it is crucial for formative evaluation of game designs, but is also important for research applications to understand human behavior. In this paper we present G-Player, a tool that aims at democratizing advanced intelligence and knowledge discovery from players’ behavior. G-Player leverages spatial visualizations, such as heat maps and event/movement plotting, to answer complex queries on spatio-temporal data. It allows quick turn-around time between data analysis, hypothesis forming and verification on multimodal datasets, and lets users gain levels of insight beyond simple descriptive statistics. As a first step, we evaluated our tool for production, through domain experts, who were asked to compare it to their current tools. Through this comparison, we enumerate advantages and disadvantages of G-Player’s design as a tool to expand our understanding of player behaviors through space and time analysis.

 

Patterns of Play: Play-Personas in User-Centred Game Development

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Canossa Alessandro Drachen Anders
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

In recent years certain trends from User-Centered design have been seeping into the practice of designing computer games. The balance of power between game designers and players is being renegotiated in order to find a more active role for players and provide them with control in shaping the experiences that games are meant to evoke. A growing player agency can turn both into an increased sense of player immersion and potentially improve the chances of critical acclaim. This paper presents a possible solution to the challenge of involving the user in the design of interactive entertainment by adopting and adapting the "persona" framework introduced by Alan Cooper in the field of Human Computer Interaction. The original method is improved by complementing the traditional ethnographic descriptions of personas with parametric, quantitative, data-oriented models of patterns of user behaviour for computer games.

 

Making Sense of Game Aesthetics [Panel Abstracts]

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Canossa Alessandro Kirkpatrick Graeme Niedenthal Simon Poremba Cindy
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

In recent years, game studies scholars have brought an expanded conception of aesthetics to bear in the study of digital games. Far from being limited to speaking about the visual presentation of games and graphic styles (with the negative associations of “eye candy”), game aesthetics has become a perspective that allows us to examine the overarching principles and qualities of the gameplay experience. Our aim is to contribute to a fuller picture of what games can hope to become. Although some of us root our work in a consideration of aesthetics as practiced historically, our perspective draws upon a range of critical and creative practices drawn from cultural theory, art history and fine art practice, visual semiotics, psychology and interaction design, We hope to supplement aesthetics’ traditional strengths in discussing the senses, emotion, pleasure and the aesthetic experience, with arguments that allow us to consider embodied play, tangible interfaces, and creative player activity. Game studies is an emerging discipline that draws upon many scholarly practices, but one thing we share is taking pleasure in play. This panel will accordingly seek to demonstrate the breadth, power and relevance of current approaches to game aesthetics by inviting scholars whose work engages aesthetics to examine a single game of their choice in depth. The games we have chosen for analysis are dot.hack, Flower, Hitman and Okami.