Towards an Understanding of How Players Make Meaning from Post-Play Process Visualizations

Abstract

Player-facing, retrospective gameplay visualizations help players track progress and learn from others. Visualizations of a user's step by step process, may be able to advance retrospective visualization. However, we currently do not know how players make meaning from process visualizations of game data. In this work, we take a first step towards addressing this gap by examining how players make meaning from process visualizations of other players' gameplay. We identify two interpretation methods comprised of six techniques and discuss what these results mean for future use of player-facing process visualizations.