Müller, S, Kapadia, M, Frey, S et al. (5 more authors) (2015) Statistical Analysis of Player Behavior in Minecraft. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2015), 22-25 Jun 2015, Pacific Grove, California. Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games ISBN 978-0-9913982-4-9
Abstract
Interactive Virtual Worlds offer new individual and social experiences in a huge variety of artificial realities. They also have enormous potential for the study of how people interact, and how societies function and evolve. Systematic collection and analysis of in-play behavioral data will be invaluable for enhancing player experiences, facilitating effective administration, and unlocking the scientific potential of online societies. This paper details the development of a framework to collect player data in Minecraft. We present a complete solution which can be deployed on Minecraft servers to send collected data to a centralized server for visualization and analysis by researchers, players, and server administrators. Using the framework, we collected and analyzed over 14 person-days of active gameplay. We built a classification tool to identify high-level player behaviors from observations of their moment-by-moment game actions. Heat map visualizations highlighting spatial behavior can be used by players and server administrators to evaluate game experiences. Our data collection and analysis framework offers the opportunity to understand how individual behavior, environmental factors, and social systems interact through large-scale observational studies of virtual worlds.
Metadata
Item Type: | Proceedings Paper |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Copyright held by authors. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. |
Keywords: | Virtual world, game, Minecraft, player data, game analytics, telemetry, online societies |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Mathematics (Leeds) > Statistics (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 16 Nov 2015 10:34 |
Last Modified: | 01 Mar 2018 21:34 |
Published Version: | http://www.fdg2015.org/papers/fdg2015_paper_39.pdf |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:88990 |