Dendrogram Visualization as a Game Design Tool

Abstract

With the advent of game telemetry, contemporary game designers have access to a huge amount of real-time data about player behavior. However, in design practice there is a lack of effective visualization tools. Activity histograms or heatmaps can suffer from data overcrowding, making it difficult for the designer to identify patterns and outliers within a large dataset. This work-in-progress explores a new meta-visualization tool for game designers that uses dendrogram representations to highlight pertinent features within large sets of heatmaps. Through interviews with professional game designers, we find that dendrograms can be used to identify outliers quickly, and are valuable in guiding designers through complex telemetry. This contributes to the ongoing work on supporting richer tools for game design practice amongst an increasingly data-filled environment.