Echo: Analyzing Gameplay Sessions by Reconstructing Them From Recorded Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Games user research (GUR) is centered on ensuring games deliver the experience that their designers intended. GUR researchers frequently make use of playtesting to evaluate games. This often requires watching back hours of video footage after the session to ensure that they did not miss anything important. Analytics have been used to help improve this process, providing visualizations of the underlying gameplay data. Yet, many of these game analytics tools provide static visualizations which do not accurately capture the dynamic aspects of modern video games. To address this problem, we have created Echo, a tool that uses gameplay data to reconstruct the original session with in-game assets, instead of abstracting them away. Echo has been designed to help bridge the gap between static gameplay data representation and video footage, with the goal of providing the best of both. A user study revealed that participants found Echo less frustrating to use compared to videos for gameplay analysis and also ranked it higher for efficiency, among others. It revealed that participants felt less cognitive load when using Echo as well. Qualitative results were also promising as participants employed several distinct workflows while using Echo. We received numerous suggestions for building upon the current state of the tool, including support for multiple viewports, live annotations, and visible gameplay metrics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".