A Taxonomy of Visualizations for Gameplay Data

Data logging has become increasingly popular among game developers and designers to track player-generated data in order to improve the player experience. For example, such data can be used to understand how players move through a game world to identify hot spots, for instance of player deaths (cf. Drachen & Canossa, 2009), or to verify problem areas (cf. Zoeller, 2010). The choice of which kinds of 224interactions of the players within the game should be logged depends on the aspects on which the subsequent analysis should focus. This is by far not a trivial task. The analysis of data can range from the comparison of values (e.g., the number of collected items for each level) to more exploratory data analysis (e.g., how do players deal with challenges, how do players navigate in the game environment).