Data mining on social network applications for entertainment industries

The focus of this project is to investigate the possibility of applying data mining techniques to answer high level design questions specific to the development of high quality multi©player first person shooter games. The industrial partner, Threewave Software, works on game development of multiplayer first person shooters. The company has developed a technology that enables the real©time instrumentation and storage of game play data and is hoping to use basic data analysis techniques to answer high level design questions. Examples of such questions are:

Weapon X is deemed imbalanced and/or not fun given the data, if we make change Y what will the results Z look like and does it solve our original issue with weapon X?
Can the system automatically detect negative experiences and notify the developer that people are generally not having fun with weapon X and the reason is most likely Y?

This project will apply data mining techniques to game play data to extract answers to such questions, which can be used to design and develop high quality games.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Ke Wang

Student:

Reza Shahidi-Nejad

Partner:

Threewave Software

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Digital media

University:

Simon Fraser University