Feedback-based gameplay metrics

Abstract

The application of gameplay metrics to empirically express a player's engagement with the game system has become more appealing to a broader range of researchers beyond the computer sciences. Within game studies, the appropriation and use of gameplay metrics not only further shifts these methods beyond formalized user testing (e.g. with the aim of product improvement) but creates a demand for a more universal approach to game metric extraction that can be applied to a wider range of games and account for different social science research agendas. Set in the context of a study into player experiences with participants aged 14-16 years of age, a method of articulating and identifying key moments of game-play pertinent to an analysis of experience with simulated violence was required [38]. This paper describes a pragmatic solution to the need to study a range of games that were determined not by the researchers but the study's participants. The solution exploits and examines the audio-video feedbacks presented to the player as part of their engagement with a game system. This paper broadly outlines this mode of metric extraction and its application to research that seeks to understand the nature of engagement and player motivations across a mixed methodology approach.

Revitalising of History through Historical Games in the Digital Era: An opening provocation into teaching history through multimodality

“…While it is usually an outlet that content creators use to share their favourite pastime to online audiences, recording and using gameplay footage as data evidence, content presentation or storytelling, and/or critical text study is already gaining traction in both research (e.g. Marczak et al 2012;Wallner & Kriglstein 2015;Redder 2023) and education applications (e.g. Gillern & Stufft 2022;Redder & Schott 2022).…”

Exploring the Cause of Game (Derived) Arousal: What biometric accounts of player experience revealed

“…The first level of our analysis is focused on measurement of the game (audio visual output) together with an understanding of the player's role in its production. Player's engagement is variously represented by a novel form of game-play metrics (see Marczak et al, 2013) that maps players' within-game behaviors via the audio-visual feedback (screen and sound outputs) produced by the game, and assessing players' physiological responsiveness (indicating levels of arousal) to gaming events. Accounts of bodily responses are then translated into biometric storyboards (see Mirza-Babaei & McAllister, 2011) that visualize any commonality or co-occurrence of a player's biometric signals and game events.…”

“…In addition to these advantages, this paper focuses on how our research design permitted the study to approach post-session analysis of player experience from different angles. For example, core to the development of our method for gathering feedback-based game metrics (see Marczak et al, 2013) was 1) a desire to abstract and summarize player experience using a technique that did not require researchers to view and manually code hours of game footage in real time, and 2) provide a method for gathering metrics that did not require access to game source code. When confronted with hours of captured game play footage generated with a commercially available off-the-shelf game title we get a player's distinct approach or playing style, determined by his/ her individual differences in learning style, comprehension, and perception, to name but a few variables.…”

“…Game studies has missed an opportunity to highlight how players might be pitting themselves against the particular logics of game systems in order to stimulate recognition that a non-pejorative or defensible form of 'violence' is in operation within games. Our research has explored the nature of gamic realism for the player and suggests that there is an argument to be made that player experiences entail a phenomenological shift away from the affect and inferences connected to mimetic representation and visual verisimilitude that constitutes the game's façade, and closer to the underlying logics on which games function Vught et al, 2012, Schott et al, 2013. That is, the experience of games is recognized as an activity of conscious engagement with a rule system.…”

“…screen death). As communication and feedback devices, the latter represent a powerful and commanding driver that guides player behavior and actions (Marczak et al, 2013). So while violent themes may cloak games, the way games function demands that they are understood as "penetrat[ing] elements of reality only to re-appropriate them and reproduce them in fragmentary modes assembled under new codes and laws" (Schott et al, 2013).…”