Game Analytics: Maximizing the Value of Player Data

792 Pages·2013·12.48 MB·English

by  Magy Seif El-Nasr Ph.D.

Magy Seif El-Nasr
Anders Drachen
Alessandro Canossa
Editors
Game Analytics
Maximizing the Value
of Player Data
Game Analytics

Magy Seif El-Nasr (cid:129) Anders Drachen
Alessandro Canossa
Editors
Game Analytics
Maximizing the Value of Player Data
Editors
Magy Seif El-Nasr Anders Drachen
College of Computer and Information Science College of Arts, Media and Design
College of Arts, Media and Design Northeastern University
Northeastern University Boston, MA, USA
Boston, MA, USA
Institute of Communication and Psychology
Aalborg University
Alessandro Canossa
Copenhagen, Denmark
College of Arts, Media and Design
& Center for Computer Games Research Game Analytics
Northeastern University Copenhagen, Denmark
& IT University of Copenhagen
Boston, MA, USA & Copenhagen, Denmark
Chapter 6 was created within the capacity of an US governmental employment.
US copyright protection does not apply.
Chapter 26 is published with kind permission of Her Majesty the Queen Right of Canada.
ISBN 978-1-4471-4768-8 ISBN 978-1-4471-4769-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-4769-5
Springer London Heidelberg New York Dordrecht
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013933305
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Foreword
Over the years, I have spent a fair amount of time teaching game production and
design. The most common point of concern has been designers wondering how to
gain some degree of self-determination. The greatest points of concern for producers
are how to tell if their designer is any good. They usually whisper these questions to
me, so the other guy can’t hear them.
I tell them the same thing: Designers are in the business of telling the future. Ask
them to put their predictions in writing and track how it works out. The results are
obvious.
The problem in the past was you could only really track the progress of a designer
on a product-by-product basis. That meant measuring them based on each product’s
success. That isn’t really often enough to make much progress as a producer or
designer, let alone a game player.
The world had changed. Designers can create new ideas, predict their effect,
develop and introduce them to a customer, and measure their results, all in a day.
Producers get to see lots of little decisions, and lots of examples of the designers’
creativity commercially deployed, for better or worse.
For some designers, this has been scary. That is good. If you can’t prove you are
right, does it matter? On the other hand, if you can change a product’s feature set
and improve its fi nancial effectiveness in a repeatable, measurable and meaningful
way, won’t most Producers leave you alone? After all, they don’t know how to do it.
At the end of the day, the truth will set you free. If you can anticipate the behavior
of a player and craft that experience to ful fi ll their expectations, aren’t you actually
in charge? What game analytics provides, and what this book describes in exhaustive
detail, is an understanding that will set you free to concentrate on the parts of the
game you can’t measure: art – and to make it great. Generally, the numbers we work
v
vi Foreword
in have short return on investment, but the stories and memories we leave behind
have the same deep impact that all art has: It changes lives. The numbers are the fi rst
tool to get to that opportunity. They unlock the door.
So take the fi rst step and unlock it. Make us believe in you.
42 65 6C 69 65 76 65
Chief Creative Director of Electronic Arts Rich Hilleman
Acknowledgments
This book took a large amount of time and effort to put together. This involved
many people. We would fi rst like to thank the authors who made this book possible:
Tim Fields, Sree Santhosh, Mark Vaden, Georg Zoeller, Andre Gagné, Simon
McCallum, Jayson Mackie, Christian Thurau, Julian Togelius, Georgios Yannakakis,
Christian Bauckhauge, Janus Rau Møller Sørensen, Matthias Schubert, Pietro
Guardini, Paolo Mannetti, Ben Medler, Dinara Moura, Bardia Aghabeigi, Eric
Hazan, Jordan Lynn, Ben Weedon, Veronica Sundstedt, Matthias Bernhard,
Efstathios Stavrakis, Erik Reinhard, Michael Wimmer, Lennart Nacke, Graham
McAllister, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Jason Avent, Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nick Yee,
Edward Castranova, Travis L. Ross, Isaac Knowles, Jan L. Plass, Bruse D. Homer,
Charles K. Kinzer, Yoo Kyung Chang, Jonathan Frye, Walter Kaczetow, Katherine
Isbister, Ken Perlin, Carrie Heeter, Yu-Hao Lee, Brian Magerko, and Cameron
Brown. All the authors have done more than two revisions of their chapters and have
been very open to our consistent nagging for more re fi nement and changes. Their
efforts is what made this book what it is.
We would also like to thank all the people who have allowed us to interview them,
sometimes more than once, to revise the information and get more contribution for
the book. This includes Jim Baer and Daniel McCaffrey from Zynga, Nicholas
Francis and Thomas Hagen from Unity, Darius Kazemi, Aki Järvinen from Digital
Chocolate, Nicklas Nygren and Simon Møller from Kiloo, Ola Holmdahl and Ivan
Garde from Junebud, and Simon Egenfeldt Nielsen from Serious Games Interactive.
We would also like to thank Alex Kirschner, Brian T. Schnieder, and Bryan Pope
from Zynga who have been a fantastic help getting the interview with Jim and Dan
scheduled and passing the interview review stage through the communication
department. This was a great collaborative effort.
We also thank the people at Game Analytics, notably Christian Thurau and
Matthias Flügge, for ongoing feedback on ideas, chapters, and reviews.
We would also like to thank Rich Hilleman for writing the foreword for us. This
was a great honor, and Karen Morris for helping set this up and getting everything
done on time.
vii
viii Acknowledgments
We would also like to thank our reviewers who had to review the chapters, some-
times several chapters and multiple times, to make sure the quality is up to standard.
In particular, we thank Bardia Aghabeigi, David Milam, Mark Sivak, Robert Mac
Auslan, Mariya Shiyko, Ben Weber, Andre Gagné, Lennart Nacke, Hector Larios,
Adam M. Smith, Julian Togelius, Carrie Heeter, Eric Hazan, Georgios Yannakakis,
Ian Livingston, Andrea Bonanno, David Tisserand, Ben Medler, Kenneth Hullet,
Rasmus Harr, So fi e Mann Harr, Joerg Niesenhaus, Tobias Mahlmann, Christian
Thurau, Bill Shribman, Pejman Mirza-Babaei, Tim Marsh, Ben Weedon, Larry
Mellon, John Hopson, Brian Meidell, Ben Lile, Bruce Phillips, Andrew Stapleton,
Dinara Moura, Tim Ward, Jim Blackhurst, Kristian Kersting, Rafet Sifa, and Heather
Desurvire .
We also thank the many companies who kindly permitted their data visualizations,
graphs, tables, and other work to be reproduced in the book.
We also thank our respective employers, Northeastern University, Aalborg
University, and the IT University of Copenhagen, and GRAND-NCE for funding
the cover image for the book .
We are also grateful to Grete Edland Westerlund for her creative input on the
cover artwork.
Finally, we direct a heartfelt thanks to our families for their continued and
unwavering support throughout the two-year long process of developing the book.
Contents
Part I An Introduction to Game Analytics
1 Introduction ............................................................................................. 3
Magy Seif El-Nasr, Anders Drachen, and Alessandro Canossa
2 Game Analytics – The Basics ................................................................. 13
Anders Drachen, Magy Seif El-Nasr, and Alessandro Canossa
3 Benefits of Game Analytics: Stakeholders,
Contexts and Domains ............................................................................ 41
Alessandro Canossa, Magy Seif El-Nasr, and Anders Drachen
4 Game Industry Metrics Terminology and Analytics Case Study ....... 53
Timothy Victor Fields
5 Interview with Jim Baer and Daniel McCaffrey from Zynga............. 73
Magy Seif El-Nasr and Alessandro Canossa
Part II Telemetry Collection and Tools
6 Telemetry and Analytics Best Practices and Lessons Learned ........... 85
Sreelata Santhosh and Mark Vaden
7 Game Development Telemetry in Production ...................................... 111
Georg Zoeller
8 Interview with Nicholas Francis and Thomas
Hagen from Unity Technologies ............................................................. 137
Alessandro Canossa
9 Sampling for Game User Research ....................................................... 143
Anders Drachen, André Gagné, and Magy Seif El-Nasr
ix