Every week, people from around the world spend more than 3 billion hours playing video games. Professor Jaideep Srivastava of the University of Minnesota and Professor Dmitri Williams at the University of Southern California find this number too large to ignore. Their software company Ninja Metrics relies on social analytics to make sense of human behavioral data from these games.
Their startup coincides with a rising trend in game play and specifically an explosion in online games. Further, promotional forces like Dr. Jane McGonigal, an influential author and occasionally controversial visionary from U.C. Berkley believes that games can solve real-world problems through increasing the amount of time spent playing games to 21 billion hours per week by 2020. There is little doubt that gaming will continue to be an extremely important global activity.
The introduction of platforms like the Nintendo Wii, the Apple iPad, and the Sifteo Cubes has opened up a variety of new options for games. The social-gaming company Zynga has been steadily building innovative games delivered over social networking platforms like Facebook. The MIT Technology Review reported last week that Zynga is planning to produce a drastically more complex, strategic, and socially interactive gave than ever before. In a TechCrunch article last year, it was estimated that half of all Facebook users play games and that 40% of the time spent on Facebook is devoted to social games like those developed by Zynga. Clearly, there is an extensive amount of activity and data being generated through these evolving social interactions in massively multiplayer online games (MMO).
The founders of Ninja Metrics have designed a technology platform, called the Katana Engine, to understand players’ behaviors in these new online communities. This platform provides a dashboard to help users understand patterns and predictive information which is computationally generated behind the scenes of the system. Dr. Williams describes this business as “providing analytics in social spaces, with both monitoring and predictive work.” These analytics, which consist of both proprietary algorithms and standard methods, are initially being applied to game data generated by players and collected by developers.
The Katana Engine enables analysis about what gamers did in-game, providing key insights into game mechanics.
This product is largely based on collaborative interdisciplinary research from the areas of social science and computer science. Specifically, social science theories have been meshed with advanced methods from artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to assist in accurately predicting human behavior in this system. Dr. Williams goes on to describe a particular competitive advantage from their research which has been baked into the product. He said, “Our primary innovation is an algorithm that can measure social influence within friendship groups. Whereas many companies know how to take advantage of social network research and report who is most connected or central, we can provide who influences whom, and to what extent.” Determining these social influences provides insight into value characteristics of players or actors in the network.
These benefits can extend outside the context of social gaming to industries like telecommunications, retail, and healthcare. While this team’s initial focus is MMO or casual game analysis, which applies to thousands of titles in an exploding online space, their platform is suitable for anyone with large-scale data where people interact. Walmart beefed up its online presence through sophisticated social identity analysis with the purchase of Kosmix to form the entity @WalmartLabs. There is a compelling case for Minnesota-based Target, which recently brought its online stores control back in-house from Amazon, to pursue similar strategies.
Ninja Metrics is utilizing social analytics to help make sense of human behavior, whether it is through game interactions or mountains of data from established industries. Their research-oriented methods, partnerships with universities and overall passion in this space are all a function of innovation for this Minnesota company. 21 billion hours per week of game-play by 2020? We’ll have to see.