The trails of Just Cause 2: Spatio-temporal player profiling in open-world games

Abstract

Behavioral profiling of players in digital games is a key challenge in game analytics, representing a particular challenge in Open-World Games. These games are characterized by large virtual worlds and few restrictions on player affordances. In these games, incorporating the spatial and temporal dimensions of player behavior is necessary when profiling behavior, as these dimensions are important to the playing experience. We present analyses that apply cluster analysis and the DEDICOM decompositional model to profile the behavior of more than 5,000 players of the major commercial title Just Cause 2 integrating both spatio-temporal trails and behavioral metrics. The application of DEDICOM to profile the spatio-temporal behavior of players is demonstrated for the purpose of analysing the entire play history of Just Cause 2 players, but also for the more detailed analysis of a single mission. This showcases the applicability of spatio-temporal profiling to condense player behavior across large sample sizes, across different scales of investigation. The method presented here provides a means to build profiles of player activity in game environments with high degrees of freedom across different scales of analysis - from a small segment to the entire game.