How Playstyles Evolve: Progression Analysis and Profiling in Just Cause 2
Evaluating progression of players in a game can take a variety of forms, but ideally combines playstyle or performance analysis with one or more aspects of progression, e.g. through a level- or mission-based structure. Furthermore, visualization of the re
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Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria [email protected], [email protected] Aalborg University & The Pagonis Network, Aalborg, Denmark [email protected] 3 Fraunhofer IAIS, Sankt Augustin, Germany [email protected]
Abstract. Evaluating progression of players in a game can take a variety of forms, but ideally combines playstyle or performance analysis with one or more aspects of progression, e.g. through a level- or missionbased structure. Furthermore, visualization of the results of analysis are essential to ensure that action can be taken on them. In this paper behavioral profiling through Archetype Analysis is combined with progression analysis, expanding on previous work in the area, and extending it into the context of Open-World Games. The proposed methodological framework is applied to the case of the action-adventure title Just Cause 2, focusing on the main storyline. The results show how players navigate the content of the title, and how some playstyles remain constant throughout the game, whereas others emerge or disappear with player progress. Additionally, player performance as a function of progression is evaluated across a number of key metrics. Keywords: Game analytics · Progression · Playstyle · Player behavior · Cluster analysis · Visualization
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Introduction
Progression is a key element of game design, vital to balancing, and therefore an important focus of investigation in Game Analytics [16]. The concept of progression in game design can refer to a variety of components, however, adopting the definition of Lopez [15], generally refers to a pattern of advance towards a goal as well as the act of navigating towards the goal. This structure is important in ensuring the user experience and player engagement. Progression ties directly in with other elements of the game, including mechanics, rewards and risk, difficulty/complexity, etc. From a behavioral analytics standpoint, evaluating progression can be performed in a variety of ways, but fundamentally combines performance analysis c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing AG 2016. All Rights Reserved G. Wallner et al. (Eds.): ICEC 2016, LNCS 9926, pp. 90–101, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-46100-7 8
How Playstyles Evolve: Progression Analysis and Profiling in Just Cause 2
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and measures of progression, e.g. through a level- or mission-based structure [2,13,16–18]. The performance component can be developed in a variety of ways depending on the involved number of behavioral features and the specific questions asked of the analysis. A commonly adopted approach is profiling, which seeks to condense high-dimensional behavioral datasets into user profiles that contain the underlying patterns of variance in the data. Towards this, a number of studies have investigated approaches such as description, segmentation as well as machine learning, for the latter notably cluster analysis [2,7,9,17,18]. Being able to analyze and visualize progression is
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