Space Engineers

Game Analytics Engineer

"Space Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering, construction, exploration and survival in space and on planets. Players build space ships, wheeled vehicles, space stations, planetary outposts of various sizes and uses (civil and military), pilot ships and travel through space to explore planets and gather resources to survive. Featuring both creative and survival modes, there is no limit to what can be built, utilized and explored."
More info here.

My job at Keen Software House includes the analysis of in-game activity aimed at improving players' gaming experience.

• Date:

  Since December 2021

• Resources:

  
  [1.] Steam Modders Interactive Network (link).

Player Social Network

Research Project

Social Network Analysis allows modeling social relationships. It follows that it is vital in games' research and development. While this branch of research on games is still young, some scholars already took an interest in analyzing players' communities and relationships, primarily in communities built around the games (e.g., social media and third-party websites). Very little research, however, has been conducted in identifying influencers within the game. And thus, whether influencers impact others through in-game actions and interactions. The importance of identifying influencers lies in some desirable properties that they hold. They represent a key subset of the player population, which, despite being usually small, has a very massive impact on the overall network. For instance, in social media, influencers are exploited to propagate products in the network. Besides, previous work has proven influencers having an outsize impact on retention in games, despite not being the elite/highly-skilled players. On the contrary, they appear to have little direct influence on the retention of others in their network.

Despite the inherent value of those individuals, it is still challenging to identify influencers, as the definition of influencers is a debated topic.

A similarly underlooked portion of players are isolated (non-social) individuals, which might need help to integrate into the community and benefit from multiplayer games' social potential. What are the motivations leading to isolation (especially when involuntary)? How can we include players in the community? How does toxicity limit sociality in games (and connected benefits)?

In summary, this project aims to deepen the understanding of social interaction patterns in games (e.g., social influence and isolation) by combining social network analysis and behavioral analysis.

• Date:

  Since October 2019

• Papers:

  
  [1.] Loria, E., Nacke, L. & Marconi, A. (2021). On Social Contagion in Gamification: The Power of Influencers in a Location-Based Gameful System. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human-Computer Interaction in Play (CHI Play). ACM. In Press.
  [2.] Loria, E., Antelmi, A. & Pirker, J. (2021). Comparing the Structures and Characteristics of Different Game Social Networks - The Steam Case. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Games (CoG). IEEE. In Press.
  [3.] Petrosino, S., Loria, E., & Pirker, J., (2021). #StayHome Playing LoL--Analyzing Players' Activity and Social Bonds in League of Legends During Covid-19 Lockdowns. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on the Foundation of Digital Games (FDG). ACM. In Press.
  [4.] Loria, E., Pirker, J., & Nacke, L. (2021). The Quirks of Being a Wallflower: Towards Defining Lurkers and Loners in Games Through A Systematic Literature Review. In Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM.
  [5.] Loria, E., Pirker, J., Drachen, A., & Marconi, A (2020, August). Do Influencers Influence? - Analyzing Players' Activity in an Online Multiplayer Game. In 2020 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). IEEE.

Adaptive Gameplay

Research Project

Monitoring player behaviors is of critical importance in games, which are dynamic by nature and require real-time interventions. In these contexts, the designer should be assisted to avoid delivering a static and monotonous experience. Consequently, the game should be able to adapt to the player interacting with it, give the best UX possible, and avoid abandonment. This project aims to analyze players' interactions with the system and with the community of players. The outcomes will give information on player experience and profile. This knowledge will lead and assist the generation of customized content for each player and continuously improves its generation strategy.

This project, which is the core topic of my Ph.D. thesis, is a generalizable and modular framework aimed at producing adaptive gameplays.
Telemetry data is exploited to continuously monitor player experience and in-game behaviors. The purpose is twofold.
This framework supports the changing nature of human behavior and preference while informing an online algorithm to procedurally generate content in the game. Besides, the framework's modularity allows studying players not only as individuals but also as part of the community.

• Date:

  Since June 2019

• Papers:

  
  [1.] Bucchiarone, A., Cicchetti, A., Bencomo, N., Loria, E., & Marconi, A. (2020). Gamified and Self-Adaptive Applications for the Common Good: ResearchChallenges Ahead. The 16th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS). IEEE/ACM. [2.] Bucchiarone, A., Bencomo, N., Loria, E., Marconi, A., & Cicchetti, A. (2020). Run-time and Collective Adaptation of Gameful Systems. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems Companion (ACSOS-C) (pp. 145-146). IEEE.
  [3.] Loria, E. (2019, October). A Framework to Infer Player Experience and Inform Customized Content Generation in Gameful Systems. In Extended Abstracts of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts (pp. 21-28).

Player Behaviors

Research Project

Behavioral profiling aims at measuring users' experiences. In games, behavioral profiling allows designers to understand not only if the game is played as expected but also to discover the presence of neglected users and unforeseen behaviors. The challenge in behavioral profiling is to condense the often noisy and high-dimensional datasets generated from in-game interaction into an interpretable set of profiles. Those profiles, embedding players' behaviors, can be used by researchers and developers to better understand interaction patterns.

This project aims to extract players' behaviors from telemetry data to profile users, inform prediction analysis, and learn users' preferences. At the same time, the focus is on continuous data, in contrast to aggregated datalogs to monitor players' change and behavioral evolution throughout their gameplay.

• Date:

  Since April 2018

• Papers:

  
  [1.] E. Loria, & A. Marconi (2021). Exploiting limited players’ behavioral data to predict churn in gamification. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, N. 47. Elsevier.
  [2.] Loria, E., J. Rivera-Villicana, & Marconi, A. (2021). Do They Play as Intended? -- Comparing Aggregated and Temporal Behavioral Analysis in a Persuasive Gamified System. In Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
  [3.] Loria, E. & Marconi, A. (2020). Reading Between the Lines -- Towards an Algorithm Exploiting In-game Behaviors to Learn Preferences in Gameful Systems. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 20). ACM, New York, NY, USA. Exceptional Paper Award.
  [4.] Loria, E., Paissan, F., &: Marconi, A. (2019). Exploiting General-Purpose In-Game Behaviours to Predict Players Churn in Gameful Systems. Proceedings of The First Game Analytics, WorkshopCEUR Workshop. . In Press.
  [5.] Loria, E., &: Marconi, A. (2019). A Data-Driven Approach to Deduce Players’ Preferences from In-Game Interactions in Gameful Systems. Proceedings of The First Game Analytics, WorkshopCEUR Workshop. In Press.
  [6.] Loria, E., & Marconi, A. (2018, October). Player Types and Player Behaviors: Analyzing Correlations in an On-the-field Gamified System. In Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts (pp. 531-538). ACM.

Play&Go

Research and Design Project

Viaggia Trento e Rovereto Play&Go is a mobile persuasive gamified system active in Trentino (Italy), with the municipality's sponsorship. The game's purpose is to elicit positive behavioral change in terms of mobility, fostering a more ecological behavior.
Every year there is a 6-month campaign in which physical prizes are provided by sponsors. This allows an iterative cycle of design, production, and evaluation of the game experience.
This project is developed in the Smart Community Lab of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento, Italy)

• Date:

  Since November 2017

• Papers:

  
  [1.] R. Kazhamiakin, E. Loria, A. Marconi, & M. Scanagatta (2021). A Gamification Platform to Analyze and Influence Citizens' Daily Transportation Choices. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, pp. 1-15. IEEE.
  [2.] Ferron, M., Loria, E., Marconi, A., & Massa, P. (2019). Play &Go, an Urban Game Promoting Behaviour Change for Sustainable Mobility. Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal – IxD&A, N.40, 2019, pp. 24 – 45.
  [3.] Marconi, A., & Loria, E. (2020). Sustainable Mobility in Smart Cities: The Key Role of Gamified Motivational Systems for Citizens' Engagement and Behavior Change. In Implications of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in Urban and Rural Environments: Emerging Research and Opportunities (pp. 211-246). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Start Night

Game developed for the Information Visualization courses, focused on the Augmented Reality.

A mobile game that uses augmented reality and whose purpose is to join astronomy and fun. It uses the current position of the player to show the visible stars and their constellation. The goal of the game is to find the stars that run away; the player has to run in the real world and win this race with time.

• Date:

  Sept-Jan 2017

• Technologies:

  Unity5, C#, Android SDK.

Wastes Hunter

Project developed during a period abroad in Sweden (Skovde).

3D treasure hunt, where the player has to find the wastes and recycle them properly. Players can choose between single and multiplayer modes. In the latter option, collaboration is essential to reach the goal. The purpose is to compare the individual and the collaborative learning applied to the environmental awareness.

• Date:

  Jan-June 2017

• Technologies:

  Unity5, C#

#HashCity

This project has been developed as my Bachelor thesis project

The game's special feature is its complete integration with Twitter: the game elements represent Tweets from public timelines. Moreover, Twitter's users can interact with the player using a combination of hashtags and mentions to help or hinder them. To simplify the communication between the social network and Unity Engine, used to build the game, has been developed a library to handle the APIs calls.

• Date:

  Oct 2015

• Technologies:

  Unity4, C#.