Vixen: interactive visualization of gameplay experiences

Visualization techniques can facilitate the understanding and exploration of relationships in usertesting data. For example, data from players' in-game movement can be combined with interview data or questionnaire results. However, the process of amalgamation is not straightforward, because the underlying data often exists in different formats. Another challenge is making these visualizations simple enough to provide a quick overview for producers, but also detailed enough to be usable and practical for gameplay programmers. Although various visualization techniques have already been introduced in this domain, most of these techniques focus on displaying large amounts of quantitative telemetry data without integrating qualitative or contextual data on player experience. Moreover, most of the current visualizations are static representations of usertesting data, so they cannot dynamically adjust to users' (e.g. producers, programmers) needs. Hence, there is a need for an interactive visualization tool that can adjust data representation based on the nature and detail level of data required from different members of a development team. This paper reports our current development efforts on a tool that assists data collection and provides a dynamic and interactive representation of usertesting data. We also report two initial studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the tool with game developers to guide our future development.