EAGER: A Cultural Analytics Framework for Identifying and Integrating Creative Patterns of User Behavior and Experience in the Scalable City Multi-User Virtual World

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed project will develop a new interdisciplinary methodology for both the analysis of user experience in virtual worlds and the design of such worlds. The methodology combines ideas from game design, computer science, information visualization, New Media Art and media theory. The project will combine two research efforts: The Scalable City developed in the Experimental Game Lab directed by Professor Sheldon Brown, and Cultural Analytics developed by the Software Studies Initiative directed by Dr. Lev Manovich. The Scalable City is an interactive artwork that uses custom computer graphics software to create a dynamically changing 3D urban environment. First, satellite imagery of real cities is manipulated through image processing routines to generate new, highly patterned terrains. After spatial analysis, areas are "zoned" for development using a variety of eccentric "real estate development" schemes - space filling curves, dense grids, mazes, and combinations of these forms. As a critical artwork, the Scalable City has been designed to challenge the existing conventions of 3D narrative environments. It engages the users in a narrative of discovery, not that of a story line, but of interacting with the world in self-reflective ways. Cultural Analytics is a computational method to quantitatively analyze patterns and rhythms in visual media such as photography, design, film, animation, choreography, and music composition. It has been developed specifically for humanities scholars of visual culture and media studies to harness the powers of computational methods to identify patterns of creativity. Using the Cultural Analytics framework, Brown and Manovich propose to develop a new methodology for the analysis of users? activities and visual experiences in a multi-user version of the Scalable City. The Cultural Analytics Framework will be embedded into the Scalable City generative software. This new analytical software layer will enable the transformation of the virtual world in real-time in response to patterns in users? behavior and visual experience. At the same time, by incorporating the new analytics techniques in virtual world generation software, the project aims to advance the current research on how to create interfaces and simulations which analyze user performance and dynamically adapt based on the results of the analysis If successful, this research is likely to have transformative effects in a number of fields. Game designers, HCI researchers, and games and media scholars will be able to analyze, visualize and interpret the dimensions of user experiences with interactive time-based cultural artifacts such as video games, animated interfaces, and interactive artworks which are not captured with current analytics techniques such as network analysis (connectivity, load, and latency), econometrics on virtual economies, and profiling player game play.