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August 28, 2007

Gameplay Metrics for a Better Tomorrow

Speaker: Darius Kazemi, President, Orbus Gameworks
Topic: Gameplay Metrics
Location: Brown's Brewing Co., 417 River Street, Troy, NY
Date: Wednesday, September 12th, 6:30-9 PM

When designing and maintaining an MMO, developers are faced with a litany of questions. Do mages level faster than fighters? What vehicles are being neglected? Which players are hubs of our social networks? What areas are densely populated? How can we detect gold farmers?

These questions are often answered with intuition - and these answers often introduce assumptions that, while intuitive, are also dead wrong. Data metrics can provide a wealth of quantitative information about player behavior, provided that there is a solid technical backbone and that an appropriate methodology is followed.

This talk will cover examples of how data metrics can crush commonly-held assumptions about player behavior and give designers a new perspective on how their virtual worlds really work. Darius will show how to ask the right questions of your game so you can get the most out of a metrics system, covering basic census information, combat metrics, macro- and microeconomics, and social network visualization.

Darius Kazemi is a data junkie, and he knows from experience that metrics, properly collected and analyzed, can vastly increase the value of each iteration in a game's development cycle. He earned his gameplay metrics chops keeping track of player behavior in games such as Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online. He's an active IGDA member, most notably as a Technology Co-Officer of the IGDA Education SIG. He keeps a blog about games and the game industry over at Tiny Subversions, and is a generally useful guy to know.

Posted by JameyStevenson at August 28, 2007 04:41 PM

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