Multivariate Visualization of Game Metrics: An Evaluation of Hexbin Maps

Multivariate Visualization of Game Metrics: An Evaluation of Hexbin Maps
Günter Wallner, Simone Kriglstein

CHI PLAY ’20: The Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play
Session: Investigating Player Behavior

Abstract
Visualizations have become a relevant instrument in games user research and analytics as well as for players to facilitate the analysis of behavioral data, including the evaluation of spatial game metrics. A fundamental task in this respect is to understand how different metrics vary across the game environment and how they relate to each other. In this paper, we evaluate a visualization based on hexagonal binning paired with visual glyphs to represent multivari-ate information. To study how much information can be encoded in a reasonable manner we created variants with varying com-plexity and measured correctness and efficiency for different types of tasks through an online study (N = 197). Our results indicate that players appreciated the clear display of multivariate data but that correctness and efficiency were also largely influenced by the visual coding and the task at hand. Based on gained insights, we discuss implications for the design of such and similar gameplay visualizations.

Remote Presentations for the The Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY 2020)