Albany IGDA Chapter: September 2007 Archives

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September 20, 2007

Meeting Report: Wednesday, September 12, 2007

IGDA Meeting Minutes by Casey O'Donnell
Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Welcome - Ian Stead
IGDA and IGDA Board - Tobi Saulnier
Introduction - Jamey Stevenson
Gameplay Metrics for a Better Tomorrow - Darius Kazemi
(Full Slides Available Here)

Welcome according to Ian Stead. First, announcements. We have comment forms, please fill them out. Darius makes a joke about metrics on his talk on metrics.

Introductory Comments by Tobi Saulnier on the goings ons of Board of Directors and the IGDA overall:

Lots of teleconferences and meetings. Programs and memberships committee has been trying to better coordinat with members. Part of this effort has been incorporating chapters into the decision making processes. They have also been looking at a new web solution for the IGDA. Currently it is a hodge-podge, and they are hoping to replace with a more robust solution. More organized. Should there be members only content? Re-negotiating with CMP with respect to GDC and Game Developer Magazine. IGDA and CMP used to be joined at the hip. GDC moved to February. Choice awards. Attempting to continue moving apart from CMP. Annual meeting may disconnect from CMP. Awards should focus on people and teams, rather than games or publishers. GDC call for papers are going right now. Deadline is October 1st.

Introduction to Darius by Jamey Stevenson, Darius is a "metrics mastermind". Worked for Turbine, D&D Online, and Lord of the Rings Online. Officer for IGDA Education SIG.

Darius Kazemi - Orbus Gameworks - darius@orbusgameworks.com

Considers himself a data geek. D&D Online (DDO) and Lord of the Rings Online (LotRO). Now part of Orbus Gameworks. They build game-play metrics middle-ware. The scope is game-play metrics. Measuring what people do in a game.

Metrics is part science. You collect hard numbers. I like metrics because I hate focus groups. "People lie. Don't trust them." I like to have hard numbers with witch to work. It is also part art, because you're interpreting the numbers. Objective observations in opposition to subjective interpretation. You have to tease the information out of the numbers through "intuitive" analysis.

Why should I collect game-play metrics?
How do I collect metrics the right way?
What can I do with metrics?

2 things. 1.) Relational database. 2.) Reporting system.

DB's versus Log files. I hate log files. The only down file to a DB is the higher learning curve. However, they are flexible, relational, and you can run queries on them.

You have to have a really fast reporting system. DDO and LotRO. We had a database for DDO, but not a good fast reporting system. Netcharts. Fast reporting front end is really important. What good is data without ...

Most important slide. Design <-> Analyst <-> Programmer.

Wrong way to build a metrics system. What should we look at? What are we gonna record? "You, designer, what do you want to record?"

Way to build a metrics question is iterative and through questions. The "designer" is a person who wants to know something. What are the top five things you would like answered? I'd like to know about X. I'd like to know Y. Analyst takes ownership of the database. Works with the customer or designer. You have to sit with the designer, and sketch out what they're really looking for. The analyst takes that and specs what they need to record to get an idea of what the DB needs to have in it. Takes that over to the programmer and says, you have to help me get this data via hooks in the game code.

Start with one good question and you'll move to more and more questions.

Managers say, "Wow, that's cool. I want more."

There are tons of questions you can ask about your game, but there are really only a few that are the right questions to ask. You have to look at your core game design and think about what the best three questions are to ask about your game.

An MMO Example:

1.) Population - constantly updating what the status of your population is. You can keep a history in the background. It forms the foundation for other things.

2.) Items -

3.) Combat - Start simple by only keeping track of which members of the population.

4.) Economy and Trade

You don't want to track things that are "throw away."

Social Networks - Networks are easy to store. You have edge tables. It ends up being simple, because it's a relational database.

"Community event" - Piece of information you want to propagate. Send a blanket email. Spam people. 5% response. Post to your forums. People on there are more likely to join in. You can find connection points between networks, and the information will propagate very quickly. Understanding the topology of your social network.

Prefuse - Free graph visualization tool.

Economy and social networks - Linking your Trade and Item tables. Oooh.

Hunting down gold farmers.

Average value of an item in trade on your system. Street value versus

In-game advertising - Where are people hanging out / looking in a game? Visualization based on Quake 3.

Get a profile of what people who leave the game. Might help you identify aspects of a game that people don't like. Integration with a billing system helps.

Q/A (Bug Hunting) - Looking for outliers. Email this developer any time this thing happens more than 80% of the time. Caught a ton of bugs just by looking at data from a beta. 90% of people abandon this question.

Customer Service - If you know what they have been up to.

Billing - Integrating with a billing system.

Network Operations - Sanity check our in game and performance networks. Yes/no our servers are maxed out when lots of people are on. For sanity checks.

Question and Answer:

1.) Standardized log file? W3C log files. Data conforming to design of game. If you've got web log reporting networks, then generating data that fits that might be a nice easy start.

2.) Middleware - Describe you data. Generates API. Plug into game.

3.) How do you look at the numbers and ascribe agency? You can bridge the qualitative and quantitative data with surveys or other metrics. You can do it on the forums.

Posted by casey at 02:19 PM | Comments (0)