Toward Visualization for Games: Theory, Design Space, and Patterns Brian Bowman, Niklas Elmqvist, Member, IEEE, and T.J
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON VISUALIZATION AND COMPUTER GRAPHICS, VOL. XX, NO. Y, MONTH 2012 1 Toward Visualization for Games: Theory, Design Space, and Patterns Brian Bowman, Niklas Elmqvist, Member, IEEE, and T.J. Jankun-Kelly, Member, IEEE Abstract—Electronic games are starting to incorporate in-game telemetry that collects data about player, team, and community performance on a massive scale, and as data begins to accumulate, so does the demand for effectively analyzing this data. In this paper, we use examples from both old and new games of different genres to explore the theory and design space of visualization for games. Drawing on these examples, we define a design space for this novel research topic and use it to formulate design patterns for how to best apply visualization technology to games. We then discuss the implications that this new framework will potentially have on the design and development of game and visualization technology in the future. Index Terms—Computer games, video games, interactive entertainment, entertainment, visualization, game analytics. F 1 INTRODUCTION and use it to mark special achievements and unlock new content. For example, the multiplayer version IDEO and computer games have a long history of the recent Call of Duty: Black Ops [57] first-person of using visual representations of data to convey V shooter collects vast amounts of statistics about player information to the player; for example, colored bars performance, and not only uses this to award special are routinely used to present vitals—health, energy, titles, emblems, and equipment to players as they play and magical power—of the player character and are the game, but also to aggregate all statistics (such as accordingly often called “healthbars” (Figure 1(a)), the number of shots fired worldwide, the number of and many games use overhead maps to show the cumulative feet fallen by all players, or the number locations of entities in the game world.
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