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Call for Papers for a Special Issue on
VISUAL GAME ANALYTICS
Information Visualization journal (SAGE)
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https://sivga.wordpress.com/
*Aim and Scope*
During the last decade game developers and researchers have started to
extensively collect in-game data of players in order to guide
decision-making. This has led to the emergence of the new field of game
analytics, that is, data analytics in the context of games. Over the
last years game analytics has considerably contributed to our
understanding of player behavior. However, with the increase in volume
and variety of data a need for effective data visualization has arisen
to support the interpretation of the complex and multimodal data sets
and to provide various stakeholders with actionable intelligence.
Despite increased attention, data visualization for game analytics is
still in its infancy and many challenges in visualizing in-game data
remain. Among others, game data is high dimensional, including time and
space as well as the virtual context when decisions are made. Thus there
is much research looking into how to reduce the dimensionality or to
build interactive visualizations systems to tackle this problem. On the
other hand, stakeholders who would like to look at game data, usually
have different needs and would like to see different level-of-details in
their visualizations. This necessitates customization and interactive
adaptive techniques. How to design such systems for effective knowledge
discovery is thus still a challenge. The purpose of this special issue
is to collect novel work on visualization techniques for game analytics
in order to contribute to the current body of knowledge and advance the
start-of-the-art of the field.
Moreover, research on gameplay visualization so far has largely focused
on informing development while research on player-centric visualization
remains surprisingly largely unexplored. However, with the growing
popularity of online games and e-sports, access to in-game data has
become an increasingly important aspect for many players, allowing them
to assess and to improve their skills, to compare their performance with
the global player community, or to discuss possible strategies. From a
developer’s point-of-view, providing players with access to in-game
data, for example through APIs, can also improve community involvement
and, in turn, increase the life-cycle of a game. As such this special
issue explicitly also calls for work on visualizations targeted toward
players in order to broaden our understanding of player-centric
visualization.
*Topics of interest*
Include but are not limited to:
· Visualizations and visual analytics system for triangulating mixed
data sources or multimodal data interpretation
· Approaches for inferring behavior from game telemetry data
(understanding the ‘why’)
· Novel visualization techniques for sequence and time-based analysis
of players’ execution traces
· Spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal analysis methods
· Comparative and change visualization (e.g., to understand the
consequences of design choices, to facilitate game balancing, …)
· Case studies dealing with player behavior analysis and which make
use of visualizations
· Evaluation of visualizations in the context of gameplay analysis
(e.g., which types of visualizations are appropriate for which kind of
tasks)
This special issue calls for papers that present novel approaches,
methods and research findings and push the state-of-the-art in visual
game analytics. As such we discourage submissions that describe
applications or case studies of existing commercial tools. All
submissions must be original and may not be under review by another
publication. All submitted papers will be reviewed on a double-blind,
peer review basis.
There are several publicly available data sets for use to visualize game
action data. We are linking to a few well documented data sets that are
available to public use, please see the dataset page on the accompanying
website. Please visit respective websites for more information on how to
download and use the datasets. These datasets are in no way compulsory
for submission, but we encourage using them if applicable so that
authors can have the ability to compare their work against one another.
*Important Dates*
Submission deadline: July 30, 2016
Reviews to authors: November 30, 2016
Revised papers due: January 30, 2017
Reviews to authors: March 30, 2017
Final papers due: May 2, 2017
Publication: October, 2017
*Guest Editors*
Günter Wallner (University of Applied Arts Vienna, Austria),
[log in to unmask]
Alessandro Canossa (Northeastern University, USA), [log in to unmask]
Magy Seif El-Nasr (Northeastern University, USA), [log in to unmask]
*Submission*
Electronic submissions of manuscripts in PDF should be made using the
online submission system and the papers should be formatted according to
the journal standards. During the submission process please indicate
‘yes’ when asked if the submission is for a special issue and provide
the special issue’s name: Visual Game Analytics. For details on the
submission process, please visit the Journal's instruction website at:
http://ivi.sagepub.com/
For additional inquiries and advice on the potential suitability of any
proposed manuscripts please contact the guest editors.
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