56 days ago
Adam Martin has posted some very good notes on the Changing A Live Game panel that I participated in this morning at ION 2008. I was looking at changing a live game from a metrics perspective (obviously), but the other panelists did a great job of covering it from a community management and design perspective, and Osma from Sulake (the Habbo Hotel folks) did a great job representing social MMOGs.
58 days ago
So I (Darius) will be in Seattle this week, Monday night to Thursday night, attending the ION Conference, which was called OGDC last year.
I’m going to be part of two panel discussions. The first is on Wednesday at 9AM, Changing a Live Game: Lessons Learned and Techniques Applied. I’ll be on the panel with Jason and Steve from 38 Studios, as well as Scott Hartsman who I met for the first time at IMGDC in March. Also on the panel is Osma Ahvenlampi, who I’ve never met before but is the CTO at Sulake (the Habbo Hotel guys). I’ll be talking about using metrics to inform your changes to a live game.
The second panel is about metrics, called Tuning the Money Funnel: Customer and Process Metrics in Online Games. Larry Mellon is moderating—if you didn’t know, he gave a seminal presentation on metrics for MMOs back at GDC 2003. He was pretty much the only name in metrics when I started doing that stuff. Also on the panel is Marty Poulin who I’ve known from GDC for a long time. This’ll be my first time doing something “official” with him. Brian Hafer is rounding it out, and I’ve never met him so I’m looking forward to meeting him as well.
If you’re in Seattle and want to meet up, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do!
68 days ago
So Valve has finally released some details of their Steamworks API , which I’ve been waiting to see for a while because they mentioned in their initial press release that you could track some player metrics with it. Here’s what they say you can track:
- INT – A 32-bit (signed) integer – e.g.: number of games played.
- FLOAT – A 32-bit floating point value – e.g.: number of miles driven.
- AVGRATE – A moving average. Your game tells the API the number of events that happened and the duration in which they happened (game time or real time, your choice). Steam merges this data with the previous average, storing the updated result (a floating-point value). For example, your game could track “Average Points per Minute” this way.
So this is good for defining a particular stat: “Okay, we’re going to track total number of shots fired over time with each weapon.” Or “accuracy over time with the shotgun.” Or “number of people you’ve recruited to your team.”
This is particularly good for defining achievements that are tracked over time: collect 25 tokens and get an achievement, or bring your win/loss ratio to 5:1 and get an achievement, etc.
What it won’t do is provide context: under what circumstances are people more accurate with a shotgun? Who’s been playing games with whom? How has someone’s statistics changed over time? Because it’s a straight-up logging system and not a relational database (I mean in execution, although technically it could be a database on the backend), it treats each event as an island.
However, for a basic achievements system, this looks pretty good. Kudos to Valve for helping bring metrics to the masses!
72 days ago
Ben Fry, one of my favorite information visualization folks, wrote a book called Visualizing Data, published in December 2007. I’ve been reading it and I highly recommend it. In the book he lays out what he considers the core iterative loop for building a visualization. Here’s his core loop.
- Acquire: Obtain the data, whether from a file on a disk or a source over a network.
- Parse: Provide some structure for the data’s meaning, and order it into categories.
- Filter: Remove all but the data of interest.
- Mine: Apply methods from statistics or data mining as a way to discern patterns or place the data in mathematical context.
- Represent: Choose a basic visual model, such as a bar graph, list, or tree.
- Refine: Improve the basic representation to make it clearer and more visually engaging.
- Interact: Add methods for manipulating the data or controlling what features are visible.
This book will definitely inform future visualizations I build.
Also, you should check out some of his video-game-related visualizations. I used to have some of these up on my office wall at Turbine.
75 days ago
I’m a subscriber to GameTap, and I noticed today that they do something pretty neat with their direct-to-subscriber marketing emails. When there’s a link in the email, it doesn’t go directly to the page in question, but rather a hash at email.gametap.com which then redirects you. This hash is unique for all links, even when two links point to the same place. So in theory the marketing department there has data on exactly which links get clicked in their mass emails.
Now I can only hope they’re doing something with it.
