Process Mining of Logged Gaming Behavior

Video gaming takes a significant position in contemporary social life. It also constitutes as an elegant scientific model to study social behavior. By applying this model, behavioral patterns and their underlying physiological processes can be precisely observed at millisecond resolutions, e.g. with functional brain imaging. To date, a detailed behavioral analysis on an event-level was only performed in a few studies. Process mining (PM) is an efficient methodology to assess and systematize these complex behavioral patterns. We describe the application of PM to semi-naturalistic behavior during gameplay of a first-person shooter (FPS). Behavioral data were collected from 18 participants performing three 10-min gaming sessions of a customized FPS during functional brain imaging. An event log recorded during gameplay represented 10 types of game events in chronological order. In total 54 sessions were entered in the analysis serving as process indicators (cases). ProM software (version 6.8 TU Eindhoven, NL) provided data summary, heuristic and fuzzy PM. Event summaries revealed that being under attack early on prevented environmental exploration and resulted in shorter behavioral cycles, in contrast to other behaviors such as navigation and active attacking. Furthermore, the Fuzzy Miner generated a general overview of the player behavior by defining gaming pattern sequences. Upon further investigation, the Heuristic Miner revealed examples of how PM could highlight important patterns in player behavior. These patterns reflect the uninfluenced behavior ('free will') of the player and the player's tendency towards aggressive or defensive behavior. PM was used to analyze and systematize behavioral patterns in complex semi-naturalistic behavior during game play and showed capability to give an overview of this behavior and then further describe detailed information about them. This can allow for more in-depth investigations of interactive social behavior in the future. Furthermore, the capability of inspecting behavioral cycle characteristics (length, performance) in varied situations enables the use of PM as a testing tool for the preparation of game related paradigms in functional brain imaging. Finally, the description of such patterns and their alterations in psychiatric disorders may be applied to investigate therapeutic targets for social impairments.