Visual Analytics Tools – A Lens into Player’s Temporal Progression and Behavior

As argued in previous chapters, developing engaging interactive new media experiences, including virtual worlds, multi-player or single-player games, involves understanding the target market. Telemetry and metrics can provide a powerful method to enable designers and other industry professionals to gain insight about their users. Previous chapters have discussed telemetry analysis extensively (see Chaps. 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17). Chapter 18 introduced the Information visualization field and game visual analytics, specifically. In this chapter, we extend the arguments made in previous chapters, specifically investigating the use of visual analytics systems that reveal player behaviors over time, where we emphasize the temporal dimension as key to revealing information that indicate causes for specific behavior, and they may also give developers more insight about popular patterns of behaviors.