game analytics

Game Analytics Magy Seif El-Nasr Anders Drachen Alessandro Canossa Editors Maximizing the Value of Player Data www.it-ebooks.info Game Analytics www.it-ebooks.info www.it-ebooks.info Magy Seif El-Nasr • Anders Drachen Alessandro Canossa Editors Game Analytics Maximizing the Value of Player Data www.it-ebooks.info Editors Magy Seif El-Nasr College of Computer and Information Science College of Arts, Media and Design Northeastern University Boston, MA, USA Alessandro Canossa College of Arts, Media and Design & Center for Computer Games Research Northeastern University & IT University of Copenhagen Boston, MA, USA & Copenhagen, Denmark Anders Drachen College of Arts, Media and Design Northeastern University Boston, MA, USA Institute of Communication and Psychology Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark Game Analytics 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 © Springer-Verlag London 2013 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, speci fi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on micro fi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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While the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication, neither the authors nor the editors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein. Cover Image: Grete Edland Westerlund Cover stock images © iStockphoto.com, used with permission Where stated, images are © Ubisoft Entertainment. © 2006-2010 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell Double Agent, Sam Fisher, Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft and the Ubisoft logo are trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the U.S. and/or other countries. Prince of Persia and Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands are trademarks of Waterwheel Licensing LLC in the US and/or other countries used under license by Ubisoft Entertainment. Based on Prince of Persia® created by Jordan Mechner. © 2007-2012 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved. Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft and the Ubisoft logo are trademarks of Ubisoft Entertainment in the U.S. and/or other countries. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) www.it-ebooks.info v 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 Foreword www.it-ebooks.info 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 www.it-ebooks.info vii 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. www.it-ebooks.info viii 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. Acknowledgments www.it-ebooks.info ix 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 Contents www.it-ebooks.info [...]... as Lead Game Analyst for Game Analytics (www.gameanalytics.com) He is also affiliated with the PLAIT Lab at Northeastern University (USA) and Aalborg University (Denmark) as an Associate Professor, and sometimes takes on independent consulting jobs His work in the game industry as well as in data and game science is focused on game analytics, business intelligence for games, game data mining, game user... for game analytics 1.3 Game Analytics, Metrics and Telemetry: What Are They? In this book you will see the following words often repeated: game metrics, game telemetry and game analytics These terms are today often used interchangeably, primarily due the relative recent adoption of the terms analytics, telemetry and metrics in game development To clear away any confusion, let us quickly define them Game. .. Game analytics is a young domain, where there has yet to emerge a standard set of key terms and processes Such standards exist in other sub-domains of analytics, e.g web analytics, providing models for establishing such frameworks in game analytics in the future (WAA 2007) To sum up, game analytics is business analytics adapted to the specific context of games This by extension makes the domain of game. .. products Game analytics is a specific application domain of analytics, describing it as applied in the www.it-ebooks.info 15 2 Game Analytics – The Basics context of game development and game research The direct benefit gained from adopting game analytics is support for decision-making at all levels and all areas of an organization – from design to art, programming to marketing, management to user research Game. .. Book This book is about game analytics It is meant for anybody to pick up – novice or expert, professional or researcher The book has content for everyone interested in game analytics The book covers a wide range of topics under the game analytics umbrella, but has a running focus on the users Not only is ‘user-oriented analytics one of the main drivers in the development of game analytics, but users... predictive modeling, optimization, forecasting, etc (Davenport and Harris 2007) Analytics typically relies on computational modeling There are several branches or domains of analytics, e.g marketing analytics, risk analytics, web analytics – and game analytics Importantly, analytics is not the same thing as data analysis Analytics is an umbrella term, covering the entire methodology of finding and communicating... of Analytics, and Daneil McCaffery, Senior Director of Platform and Analytics Engineering, from Zynga outlining Zynga’s use of game analytics and their view and future as they expand on this field www.it-ebooks.info Chapter 1 Introduction Magy Seif El-Nasr, Anders Drachen, and Alessandro Canossa 1.1 Changing the Game Game Analytics has gained a tremendous amount of attention in game development and game. .. define them Game analytics is the application of analytics to game development and research The goal of game analytics is to support decision making, at operational, tactical and strategic levels and within all levels of an organization – design, art, programming, marketing, user research, etc Game analytics forms a key source of business intelligence in game development, and considers both games as products,... user experience which is paramount in game design (Pagulayan et al 2003; Laramee 2005) Essentially, GUR is a form of game analytics because the latter covers all aspects of working with data in games contexts; but, game analytics is more than GUR Where GUR is focused on data obtained from users, game analytics consider all forms of business intelligence data in game development and research This chapter... management to user research Game analytics is directed at both the analysis of the game as a product, e.g whether it provides a good user experience (Law et al 2007; Nacke and Drachen 2011) and the game as a project, e.g the process of developing the game, including comparison with other games (benchmarking) Just like “regular” analytics in the IT sector in general, game analytics is concerned with all . foundation for game analytics. 1.3 Game Analytics, Metrics and Telemetry: What Are They? In this book you will see the following words often repeated: game metrics , game telemetry and game analytics. of the terms analytics, telemetry and metrics in game development. To clear away any confusion, let us quickly de fi ne them. Game analytics is the application of analytics to game development. of topics under the game analytics umbrella, but has a running focus on the users . Not only is ‘user-oriented analytics one of the main drivers in the development of game analytics, but users