# Game statistics: Extracting interesting patterns out of users and level

I made a small game and in course of time collected fair amount of data between users and level

The level chart is long (120 levels) but looks somewhat like this

$$\begin{array}{|c|c|} \text{level} & \text{No. of Users}\\\hline 5 & 20\\ 6 & 23\\ 7 & 15\\ 10 & 2\\\hline \end{array}$$

Being a math nitwit I don’t know how to extract useful information out of this. Can someone help me with this so that I can learn more about my users and give them things they want?

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What exactly is your question? I think you need to figure out (or tell us) what "useful information" you want. Perhaps try gamedev.stackexchange.com? –  Harry Stern Jun 16 '11 at 2:37
Are there more attributes? As it stands, (Level, Number) doesn't seem very informative. –  Jack Henahan Jun 16 '11 at 2:38

The data isn't hugely rich, so there's only a certain amount of insight you can get. If you had more data (eg, number of attempts at each level, time spent on each level).

In your position, the main question I would be trying to answer is: Which levels cause an unusual number of players to stop playing? I suspect that simply plotting the data you have onto a chart would help you spot the answer without any further calculations.

I would do this by calculating the users lost for each level:

UsersLost(level) = Users(level - 1) - Users(level)


(Depending on the shape of the data, you may find it more useful to model the proportion of users lost, rather than the absolute number.)

I would look at the distribution of these numbers to help me determine the next information I was interested in. Again, plotting the results is a useful exploratory tool.

Ultimately, I'd be looking for any levels where there's a big difference between the expected number of users lost and the actual number of users lost. These are the levels you want to investigate closely, to help identify the qualitative reason that they lose/keep users.

At this stage, I think that you'd be better off asking on a forum more suited to exploratory analytics and the user experience -- someone suggested gamedev.stackexchange as a good starting point. Mathematics might be more useful when you have figured out what you're looking for (and need help finding it).

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Your expression for UsersLost will be negative for level 6 - what might this mean? –  Henry Jun 16 '11 at 7:36
It means there is a way for a user to count on level 6 without counting on level 5. Perhaps the game has a "skip level" facility? The general principles I outline should still apply as long as players progress somewhat linearly through the levels. –  Rob Hunter Jun 18 '11 at 18:09