Hello everyone! Welcome to the presentation of our paper "What Players
Want: Information Needs of Players on
Post-Game Visualizations" in which we explored the types of
information players pay attention to and consider important, for instance, for
training visualizations. My name is Günter Wallner and I'm happy to
present this work today on behalf of my co-authors
Marnix van Wijland, Regina Bernhaupt and Simone Kriglstein.
The motivation behind this work was that video games strongly rely on players
being able to make informed decisions during gameplay.
As such video games share a long history with visualizations that convey
information about a game's state to the player
such as, for instance, health bars, tech trees and many more.
Over time collecting of behavioral data of players has also become more and
more easy which led to new application areas of
visualizations in games which go beyond using them as part of
the user interface. Nowadays players constitute a
growing target audience of such behavioral visualizations of in-game
data, also because of the rise of online gaming and esports,
which spurred interest in visualizations for training and skill development even
more.
There currently exists, however, limited knowledge about which information
players rely on to make in-game decisions.
However, understanding which information is important and why
and which goals players pursue with visualizations
is essential in order to create visualizations that are actually useful
and satisfy players' needs. As such we conducted a study to
explore and understand such information needs
with respect to post-play visualizations and
developed an inventory about important in-game information
and their relevance across genres. The study was guided by three research
questions which were related to: why players actually make use of
post-game visualizations, which information players rely on during
gameplay, and which information they consider important to include in
visualizations. In order to understand how these are
affected by different gameplay mechanics these questions were investigated with
players of three competitive online games
covering three popular genres, including Dota2 - a multiplayer battle arena game -
PubG - a battle royale game - and Starcraft 2 - a real time strategy game.
We used a mixed-methods study, starting with semi-structured interviews of 16
players of the three aforementioned games and which cover different aspects such
as the game itself, the information they rely on for
decision making, and the role visualizations are playing.
These interviews were then transcribed and analyzed
using thematic analysis to develop themes with respect to the
three research questions. To quantify these themes
and to assess their importance across a larger sample
we then followed up with an online survey asking participants to rate the
relevance of the different themes.
Based on this we developed an inventory of players' goals and information needs.
Due to the time limit I can't go into much detail today also because the
results partly very considerable across the three genres
but these are, for example, the results with respect to the information
players consider important to know about the enemy for decision making.
In the paper you can find similar detailed breakdowns for all the research
questions I mentioned earlier.
Today I would rather like to reflect on five high-level design implications for
post-play visualizations. First of all one needs to carefully
choose the data to be included as not all information is equally
important and the importance can also differ based
on the genre or the game. It's also important to
select appropriate representations for the data
which is, in turn, influenced by the data itself
and also by the task which should be supported.
Post-game visualizations are also not restricted to the information which is
visible during play and as such they can take advantage of
being able to include data which is otherwise inaccessible. In
relation to this it's also important to keep in mind that
certain information becomes more or less relevant after
playing. And lastly, players showed a high
interest in visualizations of high level concepts
that go beyond simply showing individual low-level data
but which instead require the integration of different types of data.
That's it for me for today, thanks for
watching!