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Defining personas in games using metrics

Published: 03 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Game metrical data are increasingly being used to enhance game testing and to inform game design. There are different approaches and techniques to gather the metrics data; however there seems to be a lack of frameworks to read and make sense of it. In this paper, the concept of play-persona is applied to game metrics, in the specific case of character-based computer games, where the player controls a single protagonist, around whom the gameplay and -- story evolves. A case is presented for Hitman: Blood Money (IO Interactive, 2007). Player-controlled game characters can be deconstructed into a range of components and these expressed as monitored game metrics. These metrics can subsequently be utilized to discover patterns of play by building play-personas: Modeled representations of how players interact with the game. This process can also be useful to assist game design, by informing whether the game facilitates the specific play patterns implied by theoretical play-personas.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
Future Play '08: Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Future Play: Research, Play, Share
November 2008
297 pages
ISBN:9781605582184
DOI:10.1145/1496984
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 03 November 2008

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Author Tags

  1. character
  2. game design
  3. instrumentation
  4. metrics
  5. persona

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FuturePlay08
FuturePlay08: FuturePlay 2008 Academic Games Conference
November 3 - 5, 2008
Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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  • (2024)Player Personas and Game ChoiceEncyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games10.1007/978-3-031-23161-2_149(1409-1414)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
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  • (2022)Persona-driven Dominant/Submissive Map (PDSM) Generation for TutorialsProceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games10.1145/3555858.3555890(1-10)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2022
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  • (2022)Predicting Personas Using Mechanic Frequencies and Game State Traces2022 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC)10.1109/CEC55065.2022.9870406(1-8)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2022
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