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Günter Wallner

Günter Wallner

Professor
Günter is Professor for Game Computing at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. He is working at the intersection of games user research, data analytics, and information visualization since more than 10 years. He is especially passionate about creating data visualizations to support the analysis of large-scale player behavioral datasets. Günter is editor of the 'Data Analytics Applications in Gaming and Entertainment' book and serves on the steering committee of CHI PLAY and the IGDA Analytics SIG.

Talks & sessions

Panel Dicussion: Games User Research

For the audience who are interested about Games User Experiences in general and to learn more about this topic.

Joshua Flitcroft (IO Interactive)
Jak Marshall (Hangar 13)
Francis Leo Tabios (Hangar 13)
Emma Varjo (Redhill Games)
Günter Wallner (Johannes Kepler University Linz)
Hosted by: Simone Kriglstein (Masaryk University)

The Power of Visualization for Player Research

Data gathered in games user research and analytics is constantly growing in volume and diversity. Effective data visualizations are an important part of the user research toolbox to analyze, contextualize, and draw actionable insights from it as well as to communicate the gathered data to different stakeholders. However, visualizations may also introduce bias and perceptual fallacies which have to be kept in mind. This talk will cover several visualization techniques for player-related data, ranging from spatial visualizations such as the well-known heatmaps to hexbin maps, cluster maps, and rose diagrams to techniques for visualizing movement. Benefits and limitations of the different methods will be discussed to help choose appropriate visualizations for different analysis goals within the user research cycle and to highlight potential pitfalls.