Visually exploring player strategies with Pathways, a visual analytics tool

Games User Research (GUR) is a specialized field of User Experience, (UX) adapting its methods to focus on videogames, where making a game ‘fun’ and improving engagement is as important, if not more, than making the game usable. Currently no published work has described a visual analytics system that uses a player's recorded gameplay events to uncover winning spatial strategies in competitive multiplayer matches or popular paths in open world casual games; both of which can affect the long term enjoyability of the game and provide designers with a focus for improving the game experience. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a visual analytics tool for gameplay data called Pathways which is developed to enable the exploration of players’ strategy and behaviour within the game world over time.