MEET
Dr. Alessandro Canossa, associate professor at the Institute
Exploring similarities and differences in playing behavior in
26 European and Asian countries
In spring 2022, Ubisoft launched a survey in Europe and Asia for active
players of Rainbow 6 Siege. The survey is comprised of four sections,
Demographics (age, gender), Playing habits (number of hours spent
playing per week, money spent on video games per month), Appreciation
(general rating of the game, maturity of the game) and Psychographics
(motivation, presence, insights, community attitudes, and stressors).
Our dataset consisted of 14361 total respondents from 26 countries. We
wanted to explore similarities and differences between the 26 countri-
es and opted for a data-driven approach using machine learning. We fed
the responses to the four sections of the survey to a Hierarchical Cluster
Analysis algorithm without specifying the countries to see which
groupings (clusters) would be identified. We chose Hierarchical Cluster
Analysis (Ward’s method) as it allowed us to compare similarity of
responses.
The resulting 8 clusters are:
1: Great Britain, Australia, Nederland, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Austria
(characterized by the highest playtime and tendency to cheat)
2: Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary (characterized by the youngest
population as well as the lowest levels of closeness)
3: Russia, Ukraine (characterized by the highest levels of anger
management and lowest levels of empathy)
4: Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey (characterized by high sensitivity to
stressors and physical presence)
5: India, Philippines (characterized by high empathy and interdependen-
ce and lowest spending)
of Visual Design (Royal Danish Academy), earlier assistant
professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, and asso-
ciate professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
But he has been straddling between the game industry and
academia for many years, he was in fact Senior User
Researcher and Data Scientist at Massive Entertainment
and is now a consultant on Data Insights for Ubisoft and
Czar of Player Experience at modl.ai. In his current research
he’s triangulating machine learning and data-driven insights
with surveys and lab observations to advance the field of
predictive behavioral analytics, as well as exploring more
human/visceral strategies for data visualization. He has
published more than 100 articles on peer-reviewed venues
as well as two milestones books with Springer Verlag and
Oxford University Press.
6: Italy, Spain, Portugal, France (characterized by high rating and
empathy, and motivated by feeling of agency)
7: China, Hong Kong (characterized by the highest spending, community,
sensitivity to stressors and lowest cheating and anger)
8: Japan, South Korea, Thailand (characterized by the oldest population
and lowest playtime)
The results are visualized in the figure. What we foundis remarkable for
a number of reasons:
- The algorithm was able to identify quite precise social and geographic
areas without knowing anything about the countries, for example it
differentiated between northern and southern Europe (clusters 1 and 6),
as well as differentiating between 2 blocks in Eastern Europe (cluster 2
and 3).
- The algorithm spotted similarities that transcend geographic borders:
Australia is in fact grouped with Great Britain (they share a language,
significant history, political systems, jurisprudence, education struc-
ture, etc.) and Turkey is grouped with Malaysia and Indonesia (they are
the world’s top three halal-economy exporters among the 57 countries
of the Muslim block).
- The impact of culture (here operationalized as the country of origin) is
often underplayed when discussing player communities in favor of
demographics, individual differences, or even psychographics. As this
research shows, it actually plays a much bigger role than previously
understood, to the point that it might be possible to infer and predict
the country based on playing habits and attitudes.