The Game Trace Archive

Spurred by the rapid development of the gaming industry and the expansion of Online Meta-Gaming Networks (OMGNs), many gaming studies and measurements have been conducted in recent years. However, few or no traces of games and OMGNs are publicly available to game researchers and practitioners. Moreover, the few traces that are available are shared using diverse formats. This situation is an obstacle in exchanging, studying, and using game traces. To address this problem, we design the Game Trace Archive (GTA) to be a virtual meeting space for the game community. We identify three main requirements to build an archive for game traces, and address them with the GTA. We propose a unified format for game traces, and introduce a number of tools associated with the format. With these tools, we collect, process, and analyze 9 traces of both games and OMGNs. We collect in the GTA traces corresponding to more than 8 million real players and more than 200 million information items, spanning over 14 operational years. We also show that the GTA can be extended to include a variety of real-game trace types. Finally, we discuss possible applications of the GTA in gaming area such as game resource management, Quality of Experience for players, and advertisement. © 2012 IEEE.