Games User Research: Process Mining

Unlock the Secrets of Player Behavior: A Guide to Process Mining for Game Development

Have you ever wondered...

• Why do most players gather all the components for a powerful item, but only a fraction ever craft it?
• What are the hidden paths that lead players to success in a complex puzzle, and which ones lead to failure?
• Players report a feature feels "slow," but your average metrics look fine. How can you see the actual end-to-end process to find the real bottlenecks?

Traditional analytics can tell you what players do, but they often fail to explain how they do it. This book is your definitive hands-on guide to mastering Process Mining (PM), a powerful discipline that transforms raw event data into a clear vision of the player's journey.

What is this Book About?

This guide teaches you how to analyze the actual, step-by-step processes players follow in your game. Using accessible Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) like R and Python, you'll learn to move beyond simple statistics and visualize the flow of gameplay. Discover emergent strategies, pinpoint hidden bottlenecks, and understand how player behavior aligns (or misaligns) with your design intent, especially for new and evolving game content.

Who is this For?

This book is for every GUR professional, designer, analyst, producer, or student who wants to move beyond knowing what happened to understanding precisely how it happened, sequence by sequence. It’s for anyone ready to turn event logs into compelling stories that drive meaningful game improvements.

What You Will Learn:

• Foundations of Process Mining: Grasp the core concepts (Discovery, Conformance, Enhancement) and learn to prepare your game's event data for analysis.
• Discover Player Processes: Use FOSS tools to automatically construct visual process maps from telemetry, revealing the common paths, struggles, and unexpected strategies players develop.
• Check Against Design Intent: Systematically compare actual player behavior against your designed quests and mechanics to quantify deviations, identify usability issues, and uncover exploits.
• Analyze Performance & Find Bottlenecks: Pinpoint exactly where and for how long players get stuck. Analyze timing, throughput, and resource usage to optimize game flow and reduce frustration.
• Create Actionable Recommendations: Learn to translate your analytical findings into concrete, evidence-based design recommendations that your team can implement to build a better game.

Key Features:

• A practical, hands-on approach focused on real-world application.
• Focus on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), making powerful analysis accessible to everyone.
• In-depth exploration of ethical considerations for responsible data analysis.

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This book is also available as a physical copy from https://indieuxr.fi/GURPM/.