Today, developers receive real-time feedback from players. Thanks to analyzing data, games become more appealing, and it’s not only about some huge projects, like CS:GO but also about some small ones, like video slots online. Artificial Intelligence is being trained on this info, it is becoming a worthy competitor and an intelligent assistant in the game. These are the new trends in the gaming industry and how they relate to science.
Bugs, Bonuses, and Game Balance
It used to be that the only way to get feedback from players was through reviews. However, they are often written by people who don’t like something. Players who like everything don’t write reviews or do it rarely. But the knowledge extracted from the objective data of the game, speaks if not about everything, then about both the problems and successful solutions.
The balance has changed in many games today. The honesty of game rules, the delicate balance between all objects, the ratio of simple to complex. By collecting data on virtual deaths, developers build maps that show where characters are most likely to die. The data analytics corrected glaring injustices, evened out the distribution of power among competing groups – and removed the most boring, under-attended quests. Besides, the data analytics accurately showed the moments when a user gets bored in a game.
This is noticeable in mobile games. The user installs the software and plays. After a while, the game collects data about what you like and starts to throw up new stimuli. In this way, the user gets an incentive to keep playing even when the old gameplay bored him.
Working With Data
You don’t need to build your own servers to work with data. There are ready solutions specifically for data science.
The scenario looks like this. The player has logged into the program. It “watches him” and ensures that he doesn’t leave and pays. This is targeted by push notifications that pop up on the screen when you haven’t logged into the app in a while. They remind you that the game exists, there are new quests, rewards, and opportunities to upgrade. These channels allow you to hook people when they’re not in the game, and they’re based on data analytics.
The game as a service model emerged at the beginning of this century, when most major game studios began distributing games on a subscription basis. Data analytics made microtransactions more efficient. Previously, a game was a product: you bought a disc, and that was often the end of monetization. But a game as a service can even be free at first, but you give it data, it analyzes your behavior and by constantly reminding yourself, it offers paid options and makes a profit.
Games for Big Science
Any game is a virtual space in which people act, and every action there is carefully documented.
In the real world, it would be impossible to track every move by so many people. That would require billions of sensors. A situation where everything is mathematically described is a data scientist’s dream.
That’s why data sets collected during a game with players are used to train artificial intelligence that learns to solve problems with other AIs.
This is to teach groups of robots to work together. So far, they are having a hard time interacting with each other. They can’t predict what other machines will do, they crowd together, and they get in each other’s way. Controlling a swarm of drones is a complex mathematical problem, and data from Starcraft or Dota can help solve it.
For most psychologists, games are of little value. People behave differently there than in real life, so the results of psychological research in World of Tanks can hardly be reproduced offline. Even from one game to another the results are poorly transferable, so the development companies do not trade collected data with each other.
There is an exception for studying gamers’ behavior, well-being, and the impact of games on professional and personal lives. Researchers have relied on survey data. So, scientists from Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany found that games help socialize and bring satisfaction but reduce academic performance. With the ability to analyze game data, the researchers have a new tool. With its help, researchers from Oxford found that fans of Plants vs.Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and Animal Crossing: New Horizons are more satisfied with life, when they have an opportunity to play enough.
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