Replay Analysis
A method for understanding players by mining in-engine replays of their play logs, rather than committing to specific metrics at recording time.
Replay Analysis is a method for understanding players by capturing in-engine replays of their play logs, rather than committing to a fixed set of metrics at recording time. Because a replay reproduces the original play session inside the game engine itself, designers and researchers can run new metric calculations against it after the fact, without disturbing — or re-running — the original session.
I’ve applied this method extensively to the open-ended educational game RumbleBlocks, using it to map out the space of solutions players actually found to the game’s levels. I built a toolkit for doing Replay Analysis inside the Unity game engine, and later extended the idea into Replay Enactments, using historical play data as a design material for imagining how a system might behave for different players.