How Pervasive is Business Intelligence? How About Video Games
While I was searching for new blogs, I came across one that had a post a post about data visualizations in Halo 3. For awhile now many video games, especially first person shooters, have had leaderboards showing top kills, most points, etc. Bungie has upped the ante on this. It goes further than just giving you simple statistics.
HeatMaps
Bungie has created a data visualization called heatmaps. The heatmaps show you hotspots where players were killed or killed someone else on a top down map of the level. An example would be of the Construct level kills with the Plasma grenade. Not only can you slice the data by Kills or deaths and weapon used, but they also have personal heatmaps for each player. This allows players to perform analysis both from a global level but a personal level. It will allow players to be able analyze what weapons are used most on which maps and where on that map even. It gives the player actionable data to be able to change their style and become a better player.
I can also see this data and visualization important to Bungie itself. It allows .hem to exam each map and how players react and move throughout the level. This would allow Bungie to continue to improve on the level layout and see how different layout work.
Game Viewer
Another data visualization used by Bungie is the Game Viewer. The Game Viewer allows a player to analyze a single game visually. Its a visual map of areas of the level. It shows markers where the player is and where they either killed another player at or where they were killed at. Again this allows a player to see where they are making mistakes and be able to improve their kill/death ratio.
It certainly looks like Bungie gets Business Intelligence and has adopted it. It gives their users the power to view and slice and dice their data allowing them to be able to analyze their games to be able to make better decisions in future games. This is an awesome idea and I'm hoping other games follow suit. This is a wide open area in BI for both the players and the game companies themselves.