Anders Drachen — GameAnalytics

Introducing Clustering III: Challenges and Pitfalls

Anders Drachen, Christian Bauckhage and Rafet Sifa take a look at the specific challenges involved when using clustering for game analytics.

Anders Drachen

Introducing Clustering II: Clustering Algorithms

Anders Drachen, Christian Bauckhage and Rafet Sifa briefly outline several classes of algorithms and discuss the types of contexts they are useful in. This is the second in a series of four posts.

Anders Drachen

Visualizing Dynamic Behavior Flow

One of the most important challenges in game analytics is to take the power of quantitative analysis and place it into the hands of everyone, not just trained analysts. We describe the process of developing a method for generating behavior flow profiles and visualizing how players migrate between these profiles.

Anders Drachen

Introducing Clustering I: Behavioral Profiling for Game Analytics

Anders Drachen, Christian Bauckhage and Rafet Sifa introduce the foundations of cluster analysis for player behavior, and the background for why these kinds of techniques are useful for game analytics. This is the first in a series of four posts.

Anders Drachen

Balance and Flow Maps

Anders Drachen brings Sean Houghton on the GameAnalytics blog to share some of his experiences with taking heatmaps to the next level by investigating balance maps in Transformers: War for Cybertron.

Anders Drachen

Playstyle and Progression

In this post Anders Drachen introduces some of the main challenges of finding patterns in how games are played and in how play styles change across levels. He also showcases some new research results which were obtained through a thorough analysis of Tomb Raider: Underworld.

Anders Drachen

Using Drill-Down Analysis To Find Out Why

When something is missing or malfunctioning in a game, it affects how people play. When we see players spending twice as much time on level 5 as intended, something we did not plan for is happening.

Anders Drachen

What Is Game Telemetry?

Telemetry one of the fundamental terms in game analytics, describing the collection of data over a distance. The collection, analysis and reporting of user-behaviour telemetry is the foundation for current analytics in game development.

Anders Drachen

Feature Selection and the Law of Diminishing Returns

The solution I heard mentioned most often was: track everything, analyze everything. However, this approach is not without its problems, notably in terms of the resources it requires to analyze everything.

Anders Drachen

Game Data Mining: Fundamentals

When you have data about players behaviour, server performance or system functionality, how do you convert it into something meaningful?

Anders Drachen

Metrics In Online Games: A Historical Perspective

Online games are of particular interest in game data mining because their underlying business model is highly dependent on understanding player behaviour, and currently one of the major forces driving the use of and innovation in data mining in game development.

Anders Drachen

Measuring Player Experience

if we can analyze the behaviour of a player and find out whether or not the player is having a good experience playing the game, and if not why, there is a lot of revenue that we can prevent losing from players quitting.

Anders Drachen

The Allure Of Numbers

For people working with game analysis, gameplay metrics (measures of player behavior, e.g. navigation, item- and ability use, trading etc.) is the kind of data that - if data were gemstones – would be diamonds.

Anders Drachen

What Are Game Metrics?

While the term “game metric” has become something of a buzzword in game development; metrics have arguably been around for as long as digital games have been made, but the application of game telemetry and game metrics to drive data-driven design and development has expanded and matured rapidly in the last few years.

Anders Drachen