Anders Drachen

Anders Drachen, Christian Bauckhage and Rafet Sifa briefly outline several classes of algorithms and discuss the types of contexts they are useful in. This is the second in a series of four posts.

Anders Drachen, Christian Bauckhage and Rafet Sifa introduce the foundations of cluster analysis for player behavior, and the background for why these kinds of techniques are useful for game analytics. This is the first in a series of four posts.

Anders Drachen, Shawna Baskins and Joseph Riley take a quick look at some of the interesting research papers from the hallowed halls of academia and beyond.

Using the MMORPG Glitch as a case example, Shawna Baskins, Joseph Riley and Anders Drachen describe the process of developing a method for generating behavioral profiles and visualizing how players over time migrate between these profiles.

Shawna Baskins, Joseph Riley and Anders Drachen analyse Glitch's in-game economic system, concentrating on the auction house and NPC vendors.

Anders Drachen brings Sean Houghton on the GameAnalytics blog to share some of his experiences with taking heatmaps to the next level by investigating balance maps in Transformers: War for Cybertron.

In this post Anders Drachen introduces some of the main challenges of finding patterns in how games are played and in how play styles change across levels. He also showcases some new research results which were obtained through a thorough analysis of Tomb Raider: Underworld.

Anders Drachen reports from one of those rare events where a piece of analytics work was done purely to satisfy the curiosity of those involved, but ended up revealing surprising patterns about how we as players name our characters.

If you are interested in game analytics one of the best things to do early on is to read up on what other people do. While this does not result in a plan for how to implement analytics in your game, it provides useful information guiding the design of the plan. This second post focuses on presentations, research articles and relevant material around games.

If you are interested in game analytics one of the best things to do early on is to read up on what other people do. While this does not result in a plan for how to implement analytics in your game, it provides useful information guiding the design of the plan. In this post we provide suggestions for some of the best material out there on game analytics.

How do you generate order from chaos? This is fundamentally the challenge game analysts face when given the task of making sense of some of the most complex information systems in the world: Massively Multi-Player Online Games. In this post we broach the topic of game balance in MMOGs and why making it perfect is so hard.

The terminology in game analytics is hampered by some confusion, which fundamentally stems from analytics being a relatively new thing in games. This means that the terms and methodologies are generally borrowed from areas outside of game development and adapted locally. Without understanding key terms, looking for knowledge is seriously hampered so here we will spend a bit of time outlining a few of the most important.