Biblio… WTF?
Yeah, you think, here is the science guy with his words again, but actually bibliometrics is a a good set of methods to understand and study research in your field of interest. Usually, all it requires is a publication search engine, like Scirus, ISI Web of Science (you need an institutional login), Google Scholar, BioMed Central, DOAJ, OAIster, or Faceted DBLP. And then you search your favorite terms and count the results in different clusters. You put it in your favorite spreadsheet software and plot a graph to see a general trend and compare.

Example: HCI & Game Bibliometrics
I was actually inspired to do this by Gareth over at Game Player Interaction, who always finds way more publications than you are able to read and who recently posted a DBLP search query on games. So, I sat down and gave my 5 favorite search terms a try in Faceted DBLP (which focuses on computer science). First, I put in “game* play” (note that the asterisk usually indicates any kind of affix), usabililty, hci (human-computer interaction), gameplay, and finally “digital games“. The following chart shows how they compare:

First, we notice of course the rising trend in the amount of research papers published that contain the keywords game and play. Second, we see some sort of similar trend for usability papers, also rising more slowly. Then, when looking at the hci data, we instantly notice two things: (1) the trend is not a straight line, but vibrates periodically (we call that oscillatory), (2) which also means it shows spikes, one of which is rather large for 2007. Then again, if you look at the curves usability, games and play you also see a spike in 2007. I was puzzled. Something must have happened in 2007 that must have shook the games interaction and especially the HCI community that year. Something big.

Exploring the Statistics
To find out what it was, I had a look at more statistics related to the search queries. For example, what publication venues were listed for digital games? It is clear that this search term is usually used by the DiGRA community, so as no surprise, 86.7% of all listed digital games publications where published at a DiGRA conference. Then, I looked at my gameplay keyword, at it turns out – to my surprise actually – that the main publishing venue for this was the International conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE) with 21.7% of all publications listed there. This was interesting, but did not give me the answer I searched for: What happened in 2007?

The Secret of HCI
You would of course naturally proceed and look at the hci and usability keywords next, which I did. Turns out, the two biggest HCI conferences are HCI International with 41.5% of all hci publications listed there and INTERACT conference with 11% publication share. For usability 7.6% of all publications come from the CHI conference, which is only a bit more than 7.4% that come from HCI International (which also shows that there is no established scientific venue for usability research as all other publications are shattered over different journals and conferences). The HCI International conference was founded in 1984 and is held every two years, then in 1995 the INTERACT conference was established and is also held every other year. And this is why we have this waveform of the curve for the hci keyword (- does this also mean that human-computer interaction researchers produce their research outcomes in waves?). Further investigation on the HCI conference website yielded an final insight to the question what happened in 2007!

Something Chinese
Yes, you remember the olympic games – that minor event there last year. Turns out, China (Beijing) was also hosting the HCI International conference in 2007 jointly with a bunch of other related conferences. To quote them “this event was one of the biggest ever organized in the fields related to Human-Computer Interaction and Information Society Technologies”. 2300 participants sounds truly olympic to me for a scientific conference. But there it is, the answer to a question, we never would have asked had we not looked at some statistics.

3 Cool Things You Know Now About Bibliometrics

1. You are able to see a research trend in numbers of publications (games and usability have both rising publication numbers)
2. You understand what conference venues relate to what keywords (we know that HCI International is the biggest HCI conference)
3. You understand a general tendency in publication frequency in your research field (HCI research is published every other year)

Popular Data Sources

After blogging about the Top 50 game developers, I got more interested in the revenue of the game industry. I have been searching for good game industry sales data for a while, since the NPD group figures are not easy to come by and studies related to revenue usually cost quite a bit (e.g. game developer research). Everyone knows about about favorite industry sources like VG Chartz, Metacritic, and GameStats. The latter two are more concerned with rating data while the first is definitely interesting for people interested in sales figures. However, some other really cool and helpful sites turned up when I started looking for game sales increase over the last decade in the US, which by the way looks like the following:

Game Industry Revenue

Great Game Industry Sales Data Resources

• Garaph is a website tool for generating sales data graphs for software and hardware sales of the game industry, however I could not find what source they use for their data.
• Chartget accumulates cool game industry charts from all sorts of resources (e.g. Famitsu, Gfk, Japan Gamecharts). My favorites are Capcom’s Resident Evil series sales (did not know the second part sold that well), insights about the Super Mario Bros. series, how much EA earns per platform and handhelds, or console market share in Japan or generally how bad the PSP is really doing. It is full of great looking graphics, check it out.
• The Video Game Sales Wiki is nice project, which can be edited and improved by everyone, at least for the recent years, it provides a lot of hard numbers behind video game sales.

If you know of other handy game-related statistics sites, please write a comment.

Our favorite gaming platform Steam has not only become one of my favorite tools for purchasing games, but it also seems to sport some interesting features for statistics related to Valve‘s games.

Now, being the nice guys they are, they make some of those available to the public. I find especially the statistics they report about number and locations of player deaths of high interest. They also include some pretty visualizations in the forms of heat map overviews of the levels as to where most players died on the bottom of the episode 2 page. You gotta love this approach. I always preach that is important to know your players, your consumers, the end user, the person that will use your product, play your game. Valve has totally understood this philosophy and are mining meaningful data on their player demographic, an approach which will certainly be copied by many companies soon as they become aware of the benefits. Now, while it may be interesting also for graphics cards companies and third party contractors that Valve may be working with to know the tech specs of the target machines, it is of much higher value to know how players actually play your game. Where they die. How often they die. Even much further: how they feel when that happens. I hope to see more of these significant gaming statistics become a part of the game development process. Maybe even a step closer towards game research and see how our experiments can feed back into the design process of games… Ok, you caught me dreaming for a moment there.