Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

2 Computer games and game metrics
Computer games are all about experiences and I was fortunate enough to begin my research on
games at a moment where the suits of many game development studios decided that gathering
data about the player would have been both an incredibly slick marketing stunt and possibly also a
useful tool in the hands of game designers. Gathering player data consists of defining interesting
variables in the behaviour of players in game worlds and including in the released game a piece of
software that monitors these variables by sending a record of player-activity back to the
developers. The content of this record is also addressed as game metrics. As example of an
interesting variable we could look at the death of the player (in the game world of course): where
does it happen? The resulting outcome of this type of enquiry is a heatmap (fig. 1).
Fig. 1: Heatmap from the game Halo 3 (www.bungie.net /Online/HeatMaps.aspx)
Figure 1 shows a map of the game Halo 3 seen from above, areas tinted in red identify places
where players die a lot, yellow a bit less and blue very little. Heatmaps look great on game
community websites and are also precious tools in the capable hands of level designers because
with few changes they can balance a map and solve potentially critical problems such as players
dying several times in the same spot, providing a very frustrating experience. Inebriated by this
incredibly successful story, the suits wanted more: who killed the player? With which weapon?
When did the player die and what was he/she doing at the time?
What they didn’t realize was that the data gathered from players, or game metrics, looked
something like this:
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