ABSTRACT
Data logging has become increasingly popular among game developers and designers to track player-generated data in order to improve the player experience. For example, such data can be used to understand how players move through a game world to identify hot spots, for instance of player deaths or to verify problem areas. The goal of the analysis of gameplay data is to understand players’ behaviors within the game to get answers to questions such as what items they collected, in which sequence they used these items, where they wandered around, how they interacted with each other, or how they collaborated to overcome challenges together. Typically, gameplay data can be categorized into spatial and non-spatial data. A further important dimension is time, since analyzing in which order players perform their actions in the game can give interesting insights about their strategies. Comparing data values or groups of data is one of the most relevant visualization tasks as pointed out by Tominski.
