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Fantasy, Farms, and Freemium: What Game Data Mining Teaches Us About Retention, Conversion, and Virality

By Jim Whitehead | Published: May 26, 2011

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of delivering a keynote presentation at the 2011 Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2011) conference (part of the pleasure being the location, Waikiki beach in Hawaii). My slides are available in pdf (1.3M) and ppt (13.5M). The talk explores how to use mined gameplay data to reduce the cost […]

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Rise of the Beta

By Ben Weber | Published: June 17, 2010

My dissertation work aims to build intelligent game AI by learning from replays. However, the major limitation of this approach is that the AI cannot be developed until a large number of players have first played the game. Fortunately, large-scale beta testing is becoming more popular for games. These beta cycles result in mountains of data that can be used to build AI for games. One of the most notorious beta releases is Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft 2, which ran from February 17 to June 7. The only AI provided with this release was “very easy”, which means that Blizzard may be analyzing how players actually play the game before finalizing the AI.

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Mining the World of Warcraft Armory

By Chris Lewis | Published: April 24, 2010

Many people have mined the World of Warcraft Armory for all sorts of information. Until recently, the data being mined out of the Armory was largely something I call “descriptive statistics”: statistics that are interesting in and of themselves, but don’t really require much more than counting up instances of labels. How many Orc hunters […]

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WoW Armory Data Mining: The Next Generation

By Chris Lewis | Published: March 2, 2010

Over at the Armory Data Mining blog, a plucky computational biology PhD student under the name of Darush has taken a look at some World of Warcraft Armory data and run some fascinating transformations to analyze the number of Druid players that favor bear form vs cat form when they play World of Warcraft. Note […]

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Using StarCraft as a Game AI Testbed

By Ben Weber | Published: October 4, 2009

I’ve been interested in developing AI for StarCraft for several years now. I recently came across the Broodwar API project, which provides hooks into StarCraft. It enables developers to query game state as well as issue orders to units. The Broodwar API makes it possible to write custom AI bots for StarCraft.

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