Interactive Player Journeys: Co-designing a Process Visualization System to Video Game Analytics

Within the field of game analytics, visualization has been widely instrumentalized to provide an effective graphical interface for analysts to understand player experiences, preferences, and behaviors. However, it is often difficult to decipher strategies or intent with vast amounts of granular events that are rapidly accumulating. Most current visualization approaches focus on aggregated data, utilizing fundamental charts, heatmaps, and scatterplots to conduct statistical analyses, neglecting sequential information across player behavior. In this paper, we focus on sequential visualization approaches, proposing a set of requirements and an initial version of a visualization system developed based on a participatory, iterative co-design approach, collaborating with stakeholders of different games. This co-creative development demonstrates what features analysts need to reason about process visualization, which informs game analytics research. We further discuss a technical realization incorporating the resulting requirements, e.g., manipulation, filtering, abstraction, and segmentation, as well as the underlying algorithms used to realize them.