Abstract: "Player metrics are an invaluable resource for game designers
and QA analysts who wish to understand players,
monitor and improve game play, and test design
hypotheses. Usually such metrics are collected in a
straightforward manner by passively recording players;
however, such an approach has several potential drawbacks.
First, passive recording might fail to record metrics
which correspond to an infrequent player behavior.
Secondly, passive recording can be a costly, laborious,
and memory intensive process, even with the aid of
tools. In this paper, we explore the potential for an active
approach to player metric collection which strives
to collect data more efficiently, and thus with less cost.
We use an online, iterative approach which models the
relationship between player metrics and in-game situations
probabilistically using a Markov Decision Process
(MDP) and solves it for the best game configurations to
run. To analyze the benefits and limitations of this approach,
we implemented a system, called GAMELAB,
for recording player metrics in Second Life."
"A Slower Speed of Light is a first-person game prototype in which players navigate a 3D space while picking up orbs that reduce the speed of light in increments. Custom-built, open-source relativistic graphics code allows the speed of light in the game to approach the player's own maximum walking speed. Visual effects of special relativity gradually become apparent to the player, increasing the challenge of gameplay. These effects, rendered in realtime to vertex accuracy, include the Doppler effect (red- and blue-shifting of visible light, and the shifting of infrared and ultraviolet light into the visible spectrum); the searchlight effect (increased brightness in the direction of travel); time dilation (differences in the perceived passage of time from the player and the outside world); Lorentz transformation (warping of space at near-light speeds); and the runtime effect (the ability to see objects as they were in the past, due to the travel time of light). Players can choose to share their mastery and experience of the game through Twitter. A Slower Speed of Light combines accessible gameplay and a fantasy setting with theoretical and computational physics research to deliver an engaging and pedagogically rich experience."