Natural Language Processing in Game Studies Research: An Overview
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paper_title: Chapter 58: Analysis of Log File Data to Understand Behavior and Learning in an Online Community

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How do we study the behavior of users in online communities? Researchers from a variety of disciplines have evolved a rich set of both quantitative and qualitative approaches to studying human‐computer interaction (HCI) and computer-mediated communication (CMC), and these methods are useful in the study of online communities. Unique to the study of CMC and online communities is the possibility of collecting log file data .I ti spossible for the computer to record every command typed by users—in some cases, every keystroke. In cases where users interact only online, we can collect a comprehensive record of all of their interactions. The completeness of the record and ease of collecting it are unprecedented. However, log file data is more often collected than analyzed. We can save everything, but what does it mean? This chapter presents two examples of the use of log file data to understand user behavior and learning in one online environment, MOOSE Crossing. MOOSE Crossing is a text-based virtual reality environment (or “MUD”) in which kids aged eight and older learn objectoriented programming and practice their creative writing. From analysis of log file data from the environment, we gained significant new insights into user behavior and learning. We will briefly discuss an example of qualitative log file analysis, in which a close reading of records of online interaction provides insights into how children learn from one another in this environment (Bruckman, 2000). The rest of the chapter contains an extended example of the use of quantitative log file analysis to try to understand whether there is any relationship between gender and programming achievement on this site. (An earlier version of this analysis was published in Proceedings of CSCL 2002 (Bruckman et al., 2002).) Quantitative and qualitative methods are generally more powerful when used in a complementary fashion. In the data to follow, our qualitative findings suggested that girls are especially strong achievers in this learning environment. However, quantitative analysis of log file data shows that boys and girls use the environment in similar ways. A small group of girls form the core of “the regulars”, the most active, dedicated members who are highly visible to both researchers and other members. The regulars have extraordinary levels
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paper_title: SMOG Grading - A New Readability Formula.

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in a recent issue of this journal, Fry (4) described "a readability formula that saves time." The panel immediately below gives a method of assessing readability which is even quicker and so simple that one statistician who glanced at an earlier version of this paper thought that it was a "put on," a fake. Although this system, SMOG Grading, is laughably simple, it is in fact more valid than previous readability formulas. The rest of this paper is devoted to substantiating that claim.
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paper_title: Readability Standards for Informed-Consent Forms as Compared with Actual Readability

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background Institutional review boards (IRBs) are charged with safeguarding potential research subjects with limited literacy but may have an inadvertent role in promulgating unreadable consent forms. We hypothesized that text provided by IRBs in informed-consent forms falls short of the IRBs’ own readability standards and that readability is influenced by the level of research activity, local literacy rates, and federal oversight. methods To test these hypotheses, we conducted a cross-sectional study linking data from several public-use sources. A total of 114 Web sites of U.S. medical schools were surveyed for IRB readability standards and informed-consent-form templates. Actual readability was measured with the Flesch–Kincaid scale, which assigns a score on the basis of the minimal grade level required to read and understand English text (range, 0 to 12). Data on the level of research activity, local literacy rates, and federal oversight were obtained from organizational Web sites. results
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paper_title: The aesthetics of gameplay: a lexical approach

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What does it mean to appreciate gameplay? When we judge a game's gameplay, what are the elements or characteristics of gameplay that we should focus our attention on? We report on a study that analyzed the use of the term gameplay in hundreds of thousands of user-submitted game reviews on a popular online website. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques we identified and extracted the adjectives that modified "gameplay", and then clustered those adjectives based on the words (nouns, verbs and adjectives) which appeared in the surrounding contexts. Our analysis of the resulting clusters shows a surprising richness in the variety of words used to describe gameplay, but more importantly we identify a popular aesthetic of gameplay. The primary elements of gameplay aesthetics are pacing, complexity, cognitive accessibility, scope, demand, and impact. This aesthetic provides two things: empirical support for the importance and centrality of the concepts we've outlined towards understanding gameplay, and evidence of the differences in language for describing gameplay between players and designers/scholars.
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paper_title: Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience: Analysing Immersion

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This paper presents a gameplay experience model, assesses its potential as a tool for research and presents some directions for future work. The presented model was born from observations among game-playing children and their non-player parents, which directed us to have a closer look at the complex nature of gameplay experience. Our research led into a heuristic gameplay experience model that identifies some of the key components and processes that are relevant in the experience of gameplay, with a particular focus on immersion. The model includes three components: sensory, challenge-based and imaginative immersion (SCI-model). The classification was assessed with self-evaluation questionnaires filled in by informants who played different popular games. It was found that the gameplay experiences related to these games did indeed differ as expected in terms of the identified three immersion components.
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paper_title: Predicting player behavior in Tomb Raider: Underworld

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This paper presents the results of an explorative study on predicting aspects of playing behavior for the major commercial title Tomb Raider: Underworld (TRU). Various supervised learning algorithms are trained on a large-scale set of in-game player behavior data, to predict when a player will stop playing the TRU game and, if the player completes the game, how long will it take to do so. Results reveal that linear regression models and other non-linear classification techniques perform well on the tasks and that decision tree learning induces small yet well-performing and informative trees. Moderate performance is achieved from the prediction models, which indicates the complexity of predicting player behavior based on a constrained set of gameplay metrics and the noise existent in the dataset examined, a generic problem in large-scale data collection from millions of remote clients.
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paper_title: Affective Ludology, Flow and Immersion in a First- Person Shooter: Measurement of Player Experience

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Gameplay research about experiential phenomena is a challenging undertaking, given the variety of experiences that gamers encounter when playing and which currently do not have a formal taxonomy, such as flow, immersion, boredom, and fun. These informal terms require a scientific explanation. Ludologists also acknowledge the need to understand cognition, emotion, and goal- oriented behavior of players from a psychological perspective by establishing rigorous methodologies. This paper builds upon and extends prior work in an area for which we would like to coin the term"affective ludology."The area is concerned with the affective measurement of player-game interaction. The experimental study reported here investigated different traits of gameplay experience using subjective (i.e., questionnaires) and objective (i.e., psychophysiological) measures. Participants played three Half-Life 2 game level design modifications while measures such as electromyography (EMG), electrodermal activity (EDA) were taken and questionnaire responses were collected. A level designed for combat-oriented flow experience demonstrated significant high-arousal positive affect emotions. This method shows that emotional patterns emerge from different level designs, which has great potential for providing real-time emotional profiles of gameplay that may be generated together with self- reported subjective player experience descriptions.
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paper_title: The aesthetics of gameplay: a lexical approach

paper_content:

What does it mean to appreciate gameplay? When we judge a game's gameplay, what are the elements or characteristics of gameplay that we should focus our attention on? We report on a study that analyzed the use of the term gameplay in hundreds of thousands of user-submitted game reviews on a popular online website. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques we identified and extracted the adjectives that modified "gameplay", and then clustered those adjectives based on the words (nouns, verbs and adjectives) which appeared in the surrounding contexts. Our analysis of the resulting clusters shows a surprising richness in the variety of words used to describe gameplay, but more importantly we identify a popular aesthetic of gameplay. The primary elements of gameplay aesthetics are pacing, complexity, cognitive accessibility, scope, demand, and impact. This aesthetic provides two things: empirical support for the importance and centrality of the concepts we've outlined towards understanding gameplay, and evidence of the differences in language for describing gameplay between players and designers/scholars.
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paper_title: Distributional Similarity Models: Clustering Vs. Nearest Neighbors

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Distributional similarity is a useful notion in estimating the probabilities of rare joint events. It has been employed both to cluster events according to their distributions, and to directly compute averages of estimates for distributional neighbors of a target event. Here, we examine the tradeoffs between model size and prediction accuracy for cluster-based and nearest neighbors distributional models of unseen events.
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paper_title: Patterns In Game Design

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PART I BACKGROUND 1 Introduction 2 An Activity-Based Framework for Describing Games 3 Game Design Patterns PART II THE PATTERN 4 Using Design Patterns 5 Game Design Patterns for Game Elements 6 Game Design Patterns for Resource and Resource Management 7 Game Design Patterns for Information, Communication, and Presentation 8 Actions and Events Patterns 9 Game Design Patterns for Narrative Structures, Predictability, and Immersion Patterns 10 Game Design Patterns for Social Interaction 11 Game Design Patterns for Goals 12 Game Design Patterns for Goal Structures 13 Game Design Patterns for Game Sessions 14 Game Design Patterns for Game Mastery and Balancing 15 Game Design Patterns for Meta Games, Replayability, and Learning Curves
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paper_title: Behavioral profiles of character types in EverQuest II

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This study examines behavioral profiles of different character types in EverQuest II, a popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Sony Online Entertainment. The study uses the game's player activity data to construct behavioral profiles of online game players for the applications of normal behavior recognition and anomaly detection. The behavioral profiles give insight into not only what players do in the game to level up but also how they perform on different types of task and how they work with other players. The behavioral profiles this study reports provide insight into online game player behavior, and it provides information useful for choosing a character type suitable for one's objectives in playing the game. In this study, we develop a framework for automatic behavior profiling. The proposed framework consists of the following key components; 1) segmentation analysis of historical player behaviors, 2) behavior profiling of input users (new players whose behaviors we want to label, and 3) recommendation of tasks based on input users' objectives.
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paper_title: Learning Subjective Language

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Subjectivity in natural language refers to aspects of language used to express opinions, evaluations, and speculations. There are numerous natural language processing applications for which subjectivity analysis is relevant, including information extraction and text categorization. The goal of this work is learning subjective language from corpora. Clues of subjectivity are generated and tested, including low-frequency words, collocations, and adjectives and verbs identified using distributional similarity. The features are also examined working together in concert. The features, generated from different data sets using different procedures, exhibit consistency in performance in that they all do better and worse on the same data sets. In addition, this article shows that the density of subjectivity clues in the surrounding context strongly affects how likely it is that a word is subjective, and it provides the results of an annotation study assessing the subjectivity of sentences with high-density features. Finally, the clues are used to perform opinion piece recognition (a type of text categorization and genre detection) to demonstrate the utility of the knowledge acquired in this article.
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paper_title: Extracting Product Features And Opinions From Reviews

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Consumers are often forced to wade through many on-line reviews in order to make an informed product choice. This paper introduces Opine, an unsupervised information-extraction system which mines reviews in order to build a model of important product features, their evaluation by reviewers, and their relative quality across products.Compared to previous work, Opine achieves 22% higher precision (with only 3% lower recall) on the feature extraction task. Opine's novel use of relaxation labeling for finding the semantic orientation of words in context leads to strong performance on the tasks of finding opinion phrases and their polarity.
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paper_title: Get Out The Vote: Determining Support Or Opposition From Congressional Floor-Debate Transcripts

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We investigate whether one can determine from the transcripts of U.S. Congressional floor debates whether the speeches represent support of or opposition to proposed legislation. To address this problem, we exploit the fact that these speeches occur as part of a discussion; this allows us to use sources of information regarding relationships between discourse segments, such as whether a given utterance indicates agreement with the opinion expressed by another. We find that the incorporation of such information yields substantial improvements over classifying speeches in isolation.
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paper_title: Sentiment Regression: Using Real-Valued Scores to Summarize Overall Document Sentiment

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A cover plate is disclosed for a hydraulic control panel that houses a series of manually operable valves for controlling a plurality of hydraulic cylinders associated with an implement such as a backhoe. The cover plate includes a one-piece plastic base with a plurality of upstanding, spaced apart, integral formations along its longitudinal extent through which a plurality of control handles are inserted and attached to the valves. Each formation on the cover plate is generally box-shaped with open sides and aligned openings in its upper and lower walls to permit the passage of a respective control handle through the cover plate. A closed-cell, rectangular block insert is sandwiched within each cover plate formation with an opening therethrough which is aligned with the upper and lower openings in the formation. The cover plate reduces the assembly time and labor required for connecting the control handles to the respective valves within the control panel and provides for self-centering of the control handles to a neutral position.
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paper_title: Dissecting Play – Investigating the Cognitive and Emotional Motivations and Affects of Computer Gameplay

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All games are cognitive learning environments. A cognitive approach to understanding games and gameplay emphasises the analysis and understanding of these learning functions and how game design features facilitate them. The experience of gameplay is one of interacting with a game design in the performance of cognitive tasks, with a variety of emotions arising from or associated with different elements of motivation, task performance and completion. Psychophysiological techniques provide empirical methods for investigating play that provide a foundation for developing plausible models of what those cognitive decision processes are, how they relate to design features and how emotions integrated with task performance lead to rewards of play, creating an experience of 'fun'.
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Title: Natural Language Processing in Game Studies Research: An Overview

Section 1: Why Game Reviews?
Description 1: Discuss the significance and influence of game reviews on the perception and discourse surrounding video games.

Section 2: General Techniques
Description 2: Describe the basic and advanced NLP techniques and their applications in analyzing textual data pertinent to game studies.

Section 3: Sample Research: Game Review Readability
Description 3: Present a study on the readability of professional online game reviews using various readability formulas.

Section 4: More Complex Patterns and Relationships
Description 4: Explore deeper NLP analyses, including syntactic, semantic, and discourse-level examinations, and their applications within game studies.

Section 5: Sample Research: Gameplay Aesthetics From Game Reviews
Description 5: Analyze user-submitted game reviews to uncover the adjectives and aesthetic dimensions associated with gameplay.

Section 6: Subtleties in Language Use
Description 6: Discuss sentiment analysis in gaming and how it can provide insights into player perceptions and preferences regarding games.

Section 7: Sample Research: Sentiment Analysis
Description 7: Investigate the sentiment of adjectives used in game reviews and under what conditions negatively charged words are perceived positively.

Section 8: Conclusions and Future Work
Description 8: Summarize the findings, discuss the limitations of NLP in game studies, and propose future research directions.