Game Analytics: What Video Game Owners Know About their Players

Players of first person shooter and other MMORPG games may wonder how they end up in which world (i.e. on which server in the game), how the game makers keep the play interesting for them,  how they are matched up with different players and more importantly how the games make money from free accounts on the game.

To help a game owner answer these questions the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative has invited researchers to submit proposals for a research project called “Measuring Skill Level and Optimizing Player-Matching Algorithms in Online Games.” According to the site “A major video game company wants to better match players in online game rounds. Dataset includes 1.5 million players of an online war game & individual stats from 150K play sessions.”

The PowerPoint slides accompanying the request for proposal provides useful insight into the amount of information that game owners collect about players. Everything from the amount of time they’ve been playing, where they are from and what titles they’ve played; to what their skill level is at game play as measured by things such as “Net Kills per Player on Nth Day of Their Play.” This information may be useful in criminal and civil investigations to identify the interactions that a player had with other players in game.

For more information on Wharton’s Customer Analytics Initiative, and to read white papers they have published, please visit a webpage on the Social Sciences Research Network devoted to their work.

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