PixelMEDIA Inc.

In gaming, playtesting and user research are crucial. The interface and the user experience don’t just have to work; they have to be enjoyable and engaging. That’s why game companies invest so much time in prototyping and user testing, and why they collect so much data.

But this doesn’t have to stop at the test lab. With online and networked games becoming more and more popular, game companies have an opportunity to monitor their users remotely. Some companies, like Valve – makers of the hit Half-Life franchise – constantly monitor their players, which yields some interesting statistics.

For their recent title Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Valve published several charts and maps that display how long users take to complete the game, and where they have the most trouble. They also report the average session time, the percentage of players who make it to the end, and total sessions played. The information is aggregated from, it seems, all of the people who play the game.

Here’s a heat map that details the player deaths on a given map. Can you spot the most dangerous places to stand?

Bungie, the makers of the Halo franchise, offers a different approach: they expose every single thing that you’ve done as an individual player on the system. While the game comes with a story-based, single-player mode, it also offers a number of modes of online competition. After you’ve played a few rounds, you can visit your profile on the site and see every match you played, where you placed, where you died, what medals you earned, and who you played against. You can click on the other player’s profiles as well, to see every single thing they’ve ever done. (Here’s my profile – not too impressive, I know; some of our developers have put much more time into it.)

These analytics must be invaluable to the developers, as they fine-tune the next patch or expansion. But the most fascinating thing about this info is that the game companies share it so freely with their users. As players – and for “players,” read “users” – we’re always curious to learn more about ourselves. We want to hone our skills, or test our self-image, or just learn something new about how we really behave. We love looking at ourselves in the mirror – and this mirror makes for an addictive, absorbing feature.

Tags: Bungie, data mining, playtesting, user analytics, Valve