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Predicting Player Disengagement in Online Games

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Computer Games (CGW 2014)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 504))

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Abstract

Game engagement, as one of the most fundamental objectives for game designers to achieve, has become an attractive industrial and academic topic. An important direction in this area is to construct a model to predict how long a player could be engaged with a game. This paper introduces a pure data driven method to foresee whether a player will quit the game given their previous activity within the game, by constructing decision trees from historical gameplay data of previous players. The method will be assessed on two popular commercial online games: I Am Playr and Lyroke. The former is a football game while the latter is a music game. The results indicate that the decision tree built by our method is valuable to predict the players’ disengagement and that its human-readable form allow us to search out further reasons about what in-game events made them quit.

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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Xie, H., Kudenko, D., Devlin, S., Cowling, P. (2014). Predicting Player Disengagement in Online Games. In: Cazenave, T., Winands, M.H.M., Björnsson, Y. (eds) Computer Games. CGW 2014. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 504. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14923-3_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14923-3_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-14922-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-14923-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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