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G. Wallner, S. Kriglstein:
"An Introduction to Gameplay Data Visualization";
in: "Game Research Methods: An Overview", P. Lankoski, S. Björk (ed.); ETC Press, 2015, ISBN: 9781312884731, 231 - 250.

The prevalence of internet-enabled gaming devices nowadays enables game developers to remotely and unobtrusively monitor every aspect of a game, allowing them to accumulate large amounts of data of the player-game interaction over extended time periods. This data has become a viable source for developers to guide decision-making throughout the game design process and even after the game has been released, for example, to identify balancing issues (Kim, et al., 2008; Zoeller, 2010), to understand player movement (Moura, El-Nasr and Shaw, 2011), to reduce production costs (Hullett, et al., 2011), or to uncover bugs (Zoeller, 2010), to name but a few. At the same time, the increasing popularity of online multiplayer gaming has attached great importance to in-game statistics to allow players to recap their performance and to compare it with others. This growing interest in game telemetry data is reflected by the emergence of the new field of game analytics - concerned with the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data as applied in the context of game development and game research (cf. El-Nasr, Drachen and Canossa, 2013). Game analytics heavily relies on visualization techniques to assist developers and players alike to understand, analyze, and explore the data (cf. Wallner and Kriglstein, 2013). Visualizations in game research can be helpful to discover unexpected paths which have been taken by the players, to identify possible design and balancing problems, or to find common patterns in the behavior of the players. Moreover, since the rich interaction possibilities provided by a game can give rise to emergent behavior which is hard to anticipate, visualizations can assist in exploratory data analysis helping the analyst to discover potentially interesting structures, trends, and anomalies not thought of beforehand.

gameplay, visualization

http://press.etc.cmu.edu/content/game-research-methods-overview