1 research outputs found
Glyph: Visualization Tool for Understanding Problem Solving Strategies in Puzzle Games
Understanding player strategies is a key question when analyzing player
behavior both for academic researchers and industry practitioners. For game
designers and game user researchers, it is important to gauge the distance
between intended strategies and emergent strategies; this comparison allows
identification of glitches or undesirable behaviors. For academic researchers
using games for serious purposes such as education, the strategies adopted by
players are indicative of their cognitive progress in relation to serious
goals, such as learning process. Current techniques and systems created to
address these needs present a few drawbacks. Qualitative methods are difficult
to scale upwards to include large number of players and are prone to subjective
biases. Other approaches such as visualization and analytical tools are either
designed to provide an aggregated overview of the data, losing the nuances of
individual player behaviors, or, in the attempt of accounting for individual
behavior, are not specifically designed to reduce the visual cognitive load. In
this work, we propose a novel visualization technique that specifically
addresses the tasks of comparing behavior sequences in order to capture an
overview of the strategies enacted by players and at the same time examine
individual player behaviors to identify differences and outliers. This approach
allows users to form hypotheses about player strategies and verify them. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique through a case study: utilizing
a prototype system to investigate data collected from a commercial educational
puzzle game. While the prototype's usability can be improved, initial testing
results show that core features of the system proved useful to our potential
users for understanding player strategies