What Drives People: Creating Engagement Profiles of Players from Game Log Data

A central interest of game designers and game user researchers is to understand why players enjoy their games. While a number of researchers have explored player enjoyment in general, few have talked about methods for enabling designers to understand the players of their specific game. In this paper we explore the creation of engagement profiles of game players based on log data. These profiles take into account the different ways that players engage with the game and highlight patterns associated with active play. We demonstrate our approach by performing a descriptive analysis of the game Forza Motorsport 5 using data from a sample of 1.2 million users of the game and discuss the implications of our findings.