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GameLifeVis: visual analysis of behavior evolutions in multiplayer online games

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Abstract

Analyzing the user behaviors of multiplayer online games can help understand the sociality and characteristics of players in the virtual world. The primary task is to characterize the game life and its evolution within the game. We propose a novel network-based representation, EvolutionLine Graph, which illustrates the evolving behavior of massive game players as a sequence of time-oriented transitions among various status. We design and implement a novel visual analytics system, GameLifeVis, that supports the visualization, exploration, and analysis of multi-level user behaviors in an integrated visual interface. We exemplify the efficiency of our approach with case studies on a multi-faceted dataset collected within a popular online game (15 million players) in 18 months.

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Acknowledgements

Netease supports greatly to this project, including but not limiting to data, tasks, analysis etc. We would like to especially thank to Zhipeng Hu, Bai Liu, Luyi Xie of Netease for their strong support and help. This work is also supported by National 973 Program of China (2015CB352503), NSFC (61232012,61422211,61303141, 61502416), Zhejiang NSFC (Y12F020172), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2016QNA5014), 100 Talents Program of Zhejiang University, and a grant from Microsoft Research Asia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Lab of CAD & CG, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China

    Wei Chen, Junhua Lu, Dingke Kong, Zhiqi Liu, Yandi Shen, Yinyin Chen, Jingxuan He, Shu Liu, Ye Qi & Yingcai Wu

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  1. Wei Chen
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  2. Junhua Lu
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  3. Dingke Kong
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  4. Zhiqi Liu
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  5. Yandi Shen
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  6. Yinyin Chen
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  7. Jingxuan He
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  8. Shu Liu
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  9. Ye Qi
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  10. Yingcai Wu
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Correspondence to Yingcai Wu.

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Chen, W., Lu, J., Kong, D. et al. GameLifeVis: visual analysis of behavior evolutions in multiplayer online games. J Vis 20, 651–665 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-016-0416-0

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