Darling Family “Maker” Project

MICHELLE, Product Management

GLENN, Infrastructure

CHLOE, User Experience

Big Data Case Study: Online Video Games

Case Study:

YOURCraft Online Video Game

Very popular MMOG (massively multiplayer online game.)

Wide appeal: Kids aged 5+ to Adults.

“Indie” game: not commercial, similar to OpenSource software.

Distributed: Thousands of YOURCraft servers throughout the world.

Educational: builds logical, analytical, spatial reasoning, math, problem-solving skills.

Crowd-sourced: Users build worlds using blocks similar to“virtual Legos”. Examples: Cities, Sports, Harry Potter, Disneyland & more!

Challenges GRIEFING – bad player behavior. Mixed-age,

unmonitored play leads to bad language, block destruction & online bullying.

BIG DATA VOLUME & VARIETY – One

busy server = 100GB/month 1.17TB /year of saved maps, weblogs, player messages, game metadata.

Key Trends: Online “Virtual World” Games Strategies

STICKINESS - Increase user time

spent in the game through:

CUSTOWNERS – Ability to build fun, engaging, immersive worlds builds customer loyalty & ownership.

DATA MYNING – Game personalization

based on user data (age, hours played, location.)

FREEMIUM - Give away game for free, then charge for premium services.

Case Study Problem Highlights

GOAL: Set up YOURCraft server to ensure safe, engaging & educational experience for family, friends & classmates.

Requirements: Analytics: Monitor player behavior to block griefing, encourage building, improve game

features, find monetization option$ (so we can pay the bills!)

Skill Level: Must be easy enough for teenager, 8yo and busy mom.

Fault-Tolerant: Can’t afford to lose user data such as world maps.

High Availability: Provide 24x7 access to games.

Low Startup Costs: $0 if possible.

Scalability: Start with dataset from one server… ingest datasets from hundreds later.

GRIEFING

Proposed Solution: Technology Stack

Analytics: Splunk Storm ingests weblogs & player comments.

Scalability: AWS & Splunk scale “from laptop to datacenter.”

Fault-Tolerant: AWS S3 provides secure data storage.

Skill Level: AWS AMI template enables easy setup.

High Availability: AWS EC2 provides 24x7 access.

Low Startup Costs: AWS EC2 Free-Tier for 1st Year = $0

• Splunk Storm for Weblog & Sentiment Analysis, Anomaly Detection, Dashboards. Splunk Indexes files directly; no need for ETL or database management.

Analytics & Visualization

• AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) -- similar to Hadoop HDFS. Data Storage

• Game Hosting AMI (Amazon Machine Image) for YOURCraft Server. Wizard-based template.

Application

• AWS EC2 (Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud) Infrastructure

Proposed Solution - Architecture

YOURCraft Server

• Game Web Logs

• Player Messages

• Game Metadata

• User Data

AWS S3

DATA SOURCES: Game Web Logs Player Messages

Proposed Solution Benefits Infrastructure

Cloud-based game hosting – No need to buy any hardware. Secure, scalable, high-availability, fault-tolerant storage & resources, 1st year free. Easy enough for teenager to setup and maintain.

User Experience Web log Analysis to track user “stickiness” and player activities. Easy for

an 8yo to monitor dashboards and report “griefing” so users & IP addresses can be blocked if needed.

Product Management Sentiment Analysis & Data Visualization to gain insights on attracting &

retaining users, fee-based services, monetization. Splunk works directly on AWS S3 files – no ETL or database needed. Easy for busy mom to define new algorithms & business questions.

Sample YOURCraft Weblog

Data elements we can search, summarize or graph: • Player logins

• Player IP Addresses

• Player session time

• Blocks placed

• Blocks broken

• Dangerous block placement

(fire, water, lava)

• Player deaths

• Player in-game messages

• Player issued commands

Splunk Dashboard: Monitoring Player Behavior

Splunk Anomaly Detection “Griefers” vs. “Busy Builders”

“Blocks placed” point to high-value players who do a lot of building and should be rewarded.

“Blocks broken” can signal destructive behavior. If needed, can block: • Specific users • All users from a specific IP Address.

Splunk Data Visualization: User Behavior, Stickiness

Splunk Sentiment Analysis: Player Conversations

Sentiment analysis can reveal popular themes, characters, game features. Users can be banned if

they engage in negative comments or online harassment.

Deployment strategy

Year 1: Setup YourCraft Server Use Analytics to gain insights on

server admin best practices.

Use insights to improve user experience, game features.

Share insights with other YOURCraft admins (9,000+ servers worldwide!)

Recruit other server weblogs for bigger, richer analytics datasets.

Rinse and repeat…

Year 2: Innovate & Monetize AWS Free Tier expires! Start

offering premium fee-based services such as:

Safe sandbox – parents control game content; limit playtime hours.

Members-only access to videos, tutorials, game objects, “playdates” with other players.

Use analytics to check effectiveness.

Rinse & repeat…

Innovate & Iterate

Analyze

Acquire Data