TOMB RAIDER METRICS SYSTEM REVEALED
Copyright 2009 www.tombraiderchronicles.com

[ August 13th 2009 ]

Nomedo from Tomb Raider Forums has uncovered an interesting research paper undertaken by the University of Copenhagen on 'player modeling using self-organisation in Tomb Raider: Underworld.' The project is part of Eidos' Metrics Suite which serves to collate raw data from Xbox 360 gamers playing Tomb Raider in a bid to better craft future games.

"The suite is an instrumentation system which is designed to record game metrics from EIDOS games in production and post-launch. Data from the games is extracted from the SQL server system and preprocessed. The dataset used for the experiments report contain live data, i.e. data from people playing the finished, published version of Tomb Raider Underworld in their natural habitats."

The data is then used to analyse the playing habits of gamers. "A variety of different playing characteristics (game metrics) are collected for internal analysis work carried out by Crystal Dynamics. Several gameplay features are logged for each player, such as the completion time of each game level, the number of times the player died, as well as the 3D coordinates of the player."

A complete summary of the entire paper and how the data is used to craft future games can be found via Tomb Raider Forums.