Beyond the Game: Charting the Future of Game Data Science
Günter Wallner, Anders Drachen · Games Research and Practice · 2023
Four billion people globally play games and generate enormous amounts of behavioral telemetry data every year [5].Due to the virtual nature of video games, incredibly detailed data about how people play games can be gathered.In addition, it is possible to obtain substantial contextual data through and around games and web clients.This is a far cry from the early days of digital games, when data collection consisted of measures such as coins spent on arcade machines or field observations.Today, game data is diverse, complex, and often very large in scale [4].Jointly, telemetry data and the process of analyzing it to drive decisions in design, development, and business have become a cornerstone of how games are developed, maintained, and generate revenue.However, game data is not just for driving decision-making in companies.Game data is also being used currently to empower creators and players and assist societally beneficial research.Games are evolving rapidly, taking on new forms, and are increasingly connected with other games and the communities forming around them.Recent technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are adding novel ways of interacting with game content.New experiences are designed in the space around games, from let's play streams to analysis videos, data-driven overlays on game broadcasts, online walkthroughs, guides, clans, communities, data services, in-game concerts, virtual meetings, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven training tools, tournaments, VR social spaces, and much more.The cross-reality space that has formed around games -notably in esports -even include games designed to operate in that space, for example, audience games played during esports tournaments.In esports today, you do not need to be a player to enjoy interacting with the esports community or relish experiences being created around the competitive gameplay itself, and there is no reason to expect that this is not also the case in other