Your Favourite Games Are Being Improved By Big Data: Here’s How

There’s more math in gaming than you think.

This post is presented in partnership with Monash Business School.

If you’re a big fan of games, you might be surprised by how many numbers and how much data collection actually goes into gaming to help improve its reach and your experience.

Online games collect a bunch of data on what kind of games are popular, where their most interested players are located around the world, the quality of a player’s connection, how a player might go about a game and so much more.

Learning how to understand numbers and collect data for games might be your way into a gaming development career, so here are all the ways your favourite games are taking advantage of big data.

What is big data in gaming?

When we talk about ‘big data’, we’re basically referring to the mathematical information collected by developers to help change, improve or study the way players might interact with or purchase a game.

Big data isn’t just this massive, scary, obscure thing that’s just in gaming, it’s everywhere. In fact, we often contribute to it every day. Just think about your Netflix subscription, the emails you get from your favourite shop or the kinds of ads that pop up when you browse online.

Monash Business School Associate Professor of Economics Paul Raschky tells Student Edge how games generate a lot of valuable data that is useful for a number of gaming observations.

"When people play games, that generates a lot of data and this amount of data— depending on the games—can be classified as big data," Professor Raschky says.

Monash Business School Economics PhD student Rhys Murrian explains that the big data developers collect can be anything from location information to how long players are using the game.

"If you’re playing any game, publishers of a game can collect info on how long users are online for, where they’re playing from, their IP addresses and the quality of their connection," he says.

"If you are in a game such as World of Warcraft where you are collecting tokens, it’s like an open world role-playing game.

"Publishers can look at how many friends this person may have, what is in the inventory and how many tokens or gold coins that they have."

What do gaming developers collect data for?

So, you’re wondering what the point is, this data is used to help make the games you want to play even better, or for developers to learn how to make games that you’ll want to buy.

"The most important thing for game developers is just to make the games more exciting; to see which areas of the games get more attraction activity from gamers and which gain less attraction," Professor Raschky says.

"A good developer just wants to create a very nice exciting game and I think the difficulty is, I see developers as very creative people and a lot of them have really cool ideas but at the end of the day it’s the players who make the decision about whether it’s actually a cool idea."

It’s not just about selling more games. Rhys explains that it’s also about improving the player experience and making more enjoyable games.

"By collecting all this data, developers can tailor the experience towards the gamers," he says.

How else is economics used in games?

Of course, economists can look at location and frequency data about a game, however there are also economic elements in a game that are worth taking note of.

As Professor Raschky points out, some games allow users to collect items to use in an economy specifically built for that world.

"When you think of massive online role-playing games like World of Warcraft, the way you can think about these games is that they are an economy," he says.

"As a player, you harvest things, you harvest gold pieces and then you buy goods. Now given there are millions of players, you need economists to manage the economy.

"You have a supply and a demand for goods and services in this economy, you have a certain currency which are tokens or gold coins, and you need to make sure that the supply of the currency is not too high, otherwise you create inflation or you need to make sure that everything is in balance."

Whether you want to start developing your own games or finding ways to improve some of your current favourites, getting a degree in data science or economics is a great place to start.

Why not consider a Bachelor of Applied Data Science or Bachelor of Economics with Monash Business School. If you already have a background in gaming development or economics, you could look into their Graduate Diploma or Master of Data Science or Master of Economics and Econometrics.

You can learn more about the courses available at Monash Business School on their website. 

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