Abstract
Player-facing, retrospective gameplay visualizations help players track progress and learn from others. Visualizations of a user’s step by step process, may be able to advance retrospective visualization. However, we currently do not know how players make meaning from process visualizations of game data. In this work, we take a first step towards addressing this gap by examining how players make meaning from process visualizations of other players’ gameplay. We identify two interpretation methods comprised of six techniques and discuss what these results mean for future use of player-facing process visualizations.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Afonso, A.P., Carmo, M.B., Gonçalves, T., Vieira, P.: Visualeague: player performance analysis using spatial-temporal data. Multimedia Tools Appl. 78(23), 33069–33090 (2019)
Ahmad, S., et al.: Modeling individual and team behavior through spatio-temporal analysis. In: Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, pp. 601–612 (2019)
Andersen, E., Liu, Y.E., Apter, E., Boucher-Genesse, F., Popović, Z.: Gameplay analysis through state projection. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, pp. 1–8 (2010)
Bodily, R., et al.: Open learner models and learning analytics dashboards: a systematic review. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge, pp. 41–50 (2018)
Bowman, B., Elmqvist, N., Jankun-Kelly, T.: Toward visualization for games: theory, design space, and patterns. IEEE Trans. Visual Comput. Graphics 18(11), 1956–1968 (2012)
Campbell, J.L., Quincy, C., Osserman, J., Pedersen, O.K.: Coding in-depth semistructured interviews: problems of unitization and intercoder reliability and agreement. Sociol. Methods Res. 42(3), 294–320 (2013)
Cohen, J.: A coefficient of agreement for nominal scales. Educ. Psychol. Measur. 20(1), 37–46 (1960)
El-Nasr, M.S., Durga, S., Shiyko, M., Sceppa, C.: Data-driven retrospective interviewing (ddri): a proposed methodology for formative evaluation of pervasive games. Entertainment Comput. 11, 1–19 (2015)
El-Nasr, M.S., Nguyen, T.H.D., Canossa, A., Drachen, A.: Game Data Science. Oxford University Press (2021)
Endert, A., Hossain, M.S., Ramakrishnan, N., North, C., Fiaux, P., Andrews, C.: The human is the loop: new directions for visual analytics. Journal of intelligent information systems 43(3), 411–435 (2014)
Epstein, D., Cordeiro, F., Bales, E., Fogarty, J., Munson, S.: Taming data complexity in lifelogs: exploring visual cuts of personal informatics data. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, pp. 667–676 (2014)
Esteves, J., Valogianni, K., Greenhill, A.: Online social games: the effect of social comparison elements on continuance behaviour. Inform. Manage. 58(4), 103452 (2021)
Gavin, H.: Thematic analysis. Understanding research methods and statistics in psychology, pp. 273–282 (2008)
Halabi, N., Wallner, G., Mirza-Babaei, P.: Assessing the impact of visual design on the interpretation of aggregated playtesting data visualization. In: Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, pp. 639–650 (2019)
Hazzard, E.: Data visualization in games (2014). https://erikhazzard.com/blog/game-development/data-visualization-in-games
Horn, B., Hoover, A.K., Barnes, J., Folajimi, Y., Smith, G., Harteveld, C.: Opening the black box of play: Strategy analysis of an educational game. In: Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, pp. 142–153. ACM (2016)
Javvaji, N., Harteveld, C., Seif El-Nasr, M.: Understanding player patterns by combining knowledge-based data abstraction with interactive visualization. In: Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (2020)
Jemmali, C., Kleinman, E., Bunian, S., Almeda, M.V., Rowe, E., Seif El-Nasr, M.: Maads: Mixed-methods approach for the analysis of debugging sequences of beginner programmers. In: Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, pp. 86–92 (2020)
Kantharaju, P., Alderfer, K., Zhu, J., Char, B., Smith, B., Ontanón, S.: Tracing player knowledge in a parallel programming educational game. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.05632 (2019)
Kleinman, E., et al.: “and then they died”: Using action sequences for data driven, context aware gameplay analysis. In: International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. FDG ’20, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (2020)
Kleinman, E., El-Nasr, M.S.: Using data to “git gud": A push for a player-centric approach tothe use of data in esports (2021)
Kleinman, E., Preetham, N., Teng, Z., Bryant, A., Seif El-Nasr, M.: “what happened here!?" a taxonomy for user interaction with spatio-temporal game data visualization. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5(CHI PLAY), 1–27 (2021)
Kleinman, E., Shergadwala, M.N., Seif El-Nasr, M.: Kills, deaths, and (computational) assists: Identifying opportunities for computational support in esport learning. In: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI ‘22, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA (2022). https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517654
Kuan, Y.T., Wang, Y.S., Chuang, J.H.: Visualizing real-time strategy games: The example of starcraft ii. In: 2017 IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), pp. 71–80. IEEE (2017)
Landis, J.R., Koch, G.G.: The measurement of observer agreement for categorical data. biometrics, pp. 159–174 (1977)
Lee, S., Kim, S.H., Hung, Y.H., Lam, H., Kang, Y.a., Yi, J.S.: How do people make sense of unfamiliar visualizations?: A grounded model of novice’s information visualization sensemaking. IEEE Trans. Visualization Computer Graphics 22(1), 499–508 (2015)
Lin, X., Hmelo, C., Kinzer, C.K., Secules, T.J.: Designing technology to support reflection. Educa. Tech. Research Dev. 47(3), 43–62 (1999)
Loh, B., Radinsky, J., Russell, E., Gomez, L.M., Reiser, B.J., Edelson, D.C.: The progress portfolio: Designing reflective tools for a classroom context. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 627–634 (1998)
Medler, B.: Player dossiers: Analyzing gameplay data as a reward. Game Studies 11(1) (2011)
Nguyen, T.H.D., El-Nasr, M.S., Canossa, A.: Glyph: Visualization tool for understanding problem solving strategies in puzzle games. In: FDG (2015)
Puussaar, A., Clear, A.K., Wright, P.: Enhancing personal informatics through social sensemaking. In: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 6936–6942 (2017)
RPGLogs, L.: Warcraft logs (2013–2021). https://www.warcraftlogs.com/
Saldaña, J.: The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Sage (2015)
Sandouka, K.: Interactive visualizations: A literature review. MWAIS 2019 Proceedings. p. 8 (2019)
Shneiderman, B.: The eyes have it: A task by data type taxonomy for information visualizations. In: Proceedings 1996 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages, pp. 336–343. IEEE (1996)
Sjöblom, M., Hamari, J.: Why do people watch others play video games? an empirical study on the motivations of twitch users. Comput. Hum. Behav. 75, 985–996 (2017)
Temkin, B.D.: Mapping the customer journey. Forrester Res. 3, 20 (2010)
Valiati, E.R., Pimenta, M.S., Freitas, C.M.: A taxonomy of tasks for guiding the evaluation of multidimensional visualizations. In: Proceedings of the 2006 AVI Workshop on Beyond time and Errors: Novel Evaluation Methods for Information Visualization, pp. 1–6 (2006)
Valls-Vargas, J., Zhu, J., Ontañón, S.: Graph grammar-based controllable generation of puzzles for a learning game about parallel programming. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, pp. 1–10 (2017)
Van Der Aalst, W.: Process mining: overview and opportunities. ACM Trans. Manage. Inform. Syst. (TMIS) 3(2), 1–17 (2012)
Van Der Aalst, W., et al.: Process Mining Manifesto. In: Daniel, F., Barkaoui, K., Dustdar, S. (eds.) BPM 2011. LNBIP, vol. 99, pp. 169–194. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28108-2_19
van der Aalst, W., Adriansyah, A., van Dongen, B.: Causal nets: a modeling language tailored towards process discovery. In: Katoen, J.-P., König, B. (eds.) CONCUR 2011. LNCS, vol. 6901, pp. 28–42. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23217-6_3
Villareale, J., F. Biemer, C., Seif El-Nasr, M., Zhu, J.: Reflection in game-based learning: A survey of programming games. In: International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, pp. 1–9 (2020)
Wallner, G., Kriglstein, S.: Visualizations for retrospective analysis of battles in team-based combat games: A user study. In: Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, pp. 22–32 (2016)
Wallner, G.: Play-graph: A methodology and visualization approach for the analysis of gameplay data. In: FDG, pp. 253–260 (2013)
White, S.A.: Introduction to bpmn. Ibm Cooperation 2(0), 0 (2004)
Yi, J.S., ah Kang, Y., Stasko, J., Jacko, J.A.: Toward a deeper understanding of the role of interaction in information visualization. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 13(6), 1224–1231 (2007)
Yi, J.S., Kang, Y.a., Stasko, J.T., Jacko, J.A.: Understanding and characterizing insights: how do people gain insights using information visualization? In: Proceedings of the 2008 Workshop on BEyond time and errors: novel evaLuation methods for Information Visualization, pp. 1–6 (2008)
Zhu, J., et al.: Programming in game space: how to represent parallel programming concepts in an educational game. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, pp. 1–10 (2019)
Zhu, J., El-Nasr, M.S.: Open player modeling: Empowering players through data transparency. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.05810 (2021)
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the national Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant #1917855. The authors would like to thank all past and current members of the project.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kleinman, E. et al. (2022). Towards an Understanding of How Players Make Meaning from Post-Play Process Visualizations. In: Göbl, B., van der Spek, E., Baalsrud Hauge, J., McCall, R. (eds) Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2022. ICEC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13477. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20212-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20212-4_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-20211-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-20212-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)