Educational games have emerged as potent tools for helping students understand complex concepts and are now ubiquitous in global classrooms, amassing vast data. However, there is a notable gap in research concerning the effective visualization of this data to serve two key functions: (a) guiding students in reflecting upon their game-based learning and (b) aiding them in analyzing peer strategies. In this paper, we engage educators, students, and researchers as essential stakeholders. Taking a Design-Based Research (DBR) approach, we incorporate UX design methods to develop an innovative visualization system that helps players learn through gaining insights from their own and peers’ gameplay and strategies.

Within the field of game analytics, visualization has been widely instrumentalized to provide an effective graphical interface for analysts to understand player experiences, preferences, and behaviors. However, it is often difficult to decipher strategies or intent with vast amounts of granular events that are rapidly accumulating. Most current visualization approaches focus on aggregated data, utilizing fundamental charts, heatmaps, and scatterplots to conduct statistical analyses, neglecting sequential information across player behavior. In this paper, we focus on sequential visualization approaches, proposing a set of requirements and an initial version of a visualization system developed based on a participatory, iterative co-design approach, collaborating with stakeholders of different games. This co-creative development demonstrates what features analysts need to reason about process visualization, which informs game analytics research. We further discuss a technical realization incorporating the resulting requirements, e.g., manipulation, filtering, abstraction, and segmentation, as well as the underlying algorithms used to realize them.

Today's videogames are often intertwined with profound religious narratives, content, characters, and artifacts - but how do player communities understand the role of religion in games, and what is the impression of believers on the use, portrayal, and representation of the religion they practice? This paper dives deep into this confluence by rigorously analyzing discussions from religion and videogame subreddits that often depict the most popular communication channel for their communities. Following topic modeling, we cluster posts and comments from the three major religious groups and the most popular related videogame subreddits, bringing forth representative cultural sentiments and patterns of players and religious stakeholders. Through this, we discovered 22 distinct sub-themes, further categorized into the three overarching themes of (a) Blasphemous Elements of Videogames, (b) Religion as a Design Space for Videogames, and (c) Videogames for Religious Education and Community Forming.

Identifying explainable player strategies and decision patterns that give insights into player behavior is one of the most difficult tasks for game analytics, yet yields great informative potential for various purposes. Industrial stakeholders can capture player experience and infer issues or feedback on design, content, and game balancing - while players themselves might want to leverage this technique to contrast their style of play to other players, fostering self-regulated learning. On top of that, in the case of educational games, the identification of learning strategies (as well as the discovery of popular erroneous strategies) could even elevate their potential to successfully communicate educational concepts. To advance this field, we investigate how the spatial map of a game contributes to identifying player strategies and emphasize the importance of the appropriate level of abstraction to capture strategical decisions. Using visualizations and expert domain knowledge about spatial abstraction, we illustrate how the partitioning into affordance zones can reveal patterns and strategies in gameplay. To showcase the generalizability of our methodology, we investigate two case studies for the distinct genres of educational games (Parallel) and MMORPGs (Guild Wars 2). The two case studies unveil insightful strategies between different player sets of interest – only possible by the apt level of spatial abstraction.

In this demo paper, we present Parallel OPM. Informed by research on player needs of AI in educational games [1], it is a new visualization system that uses play community data from other players to help players compare and reflect on their gameplay with their peers in the game Parallel [2]. In this demo paper/session: participants will (i) have the opportunity to play a level in the game Parallel [2] (ii) Use the guided reflection system to analyze and reflect on their gameplay compared to their peers.

Emotion regulation and coping strategies are key to resilience, problem solving and eventually well-being in everyday life, but investigating or influencing these without adjustable and ecologically valid environments still poses a major challenge. With respect to video games, stressful events can frequently appear and, depending on the individual’s emotion regulation, lead to frustrating experiences, dissatisfied players or even churn – or to a sense of accomplishment, mastery or positive tension. In the greater endeavor of establishing games for studying, controlling and reinforcing resilience, we developed an alternate reality game that unifies the advantages of a fully customizable game environment with the close connection to real-life interactions. To estimate how emotion regulation strategies could be initiated as well as investigated, this work first induces different kinds of established stressors (time pressure, social encounters and being unchangeably stuck) into ordinary gameplay, quantifies the players’ physiological and psychological responses and addresses the participants’ strategies on dealing with these situations. In this paper we present results of the study showing that the induced stressors were effective in constituting stressful situations comparable to real-life experiences; and each of these conditions resulted in different types of physiological and perceived responses and behaviors, e.g. continuous stress in social encounters versus instantaneous stress when notified about time pressure; or frustrating experiences when being forcibly stuck versus stress that participants underwent but were able to work against. With this platform to study how people cope with stress, instituted within a multi-modal mixed-methods evaluation, we contribute to games beyond entertainment towards educating resilience.

Anthropology, defined as the scientific study of human development and societies, can play a critical role in the design of (video) game mechanics and aesthetics. Especially religion and culture are seen as fundamental components in building communities, societies, and human evolution. In this paper, we present (1) a case study using UX methods such as ethnography, grounded theory, participatory design, and user interviews to develop and evaluate design spaces generated from cultural spaces, (2) this design space in the form of paradigms and syntagms and (3) how this design space can assist in the construction of novel and culturally sensitive characters.

The game design community has a long history of adapting different forms of AI techniques to produce new playable experiences. However, current AI-based game design literature focuses primarily on designers’ intent and expression. This paper argues that engaging with players’ perspectives on AI during development is an essential but often overlooked piece in existing AI-based game design processes. By integrating this perspective, game designers can better outline how players may experience AI in the context of games and tailor design decisions to the intended experience. This paper offers three case studies that incorporate the player perspective into the design process and discusses design implications.

In this paper, we propose a framework to generate cricket highlights from broadcasted cricket matches. Generating cricket highlights is a difficult problem, due to the duration and rules of the game. We formulate the highlight generation problem as a key-event initialization and key-event-closure identification problem. We propose an Inverse Hierarchical Framework, which is generic and capable of automatically generating highlights of a broadcasted cricket match. We introduce a novel context-aware approach for event-initialization and a Structural Similarity Index-based approach for event-closure detection. Despite the quality of highlights being a subjective measure we provide an evaluation of our framework by comparing it with official highlights on various metrics. We also perform a user-survey on the generated highlights. The approval of the users and overlap between the generated highlights and official highlights indicate the robustness of our framework.