Improving player experience in Computer Games by using players' behavior analysis and linguistic descriptions

•The new technology is based on monitoring and analyzing the actions of players in computer games.•It provides to players and researchers with immediate and global linguistic reports.•It is suited for understanding actions at different levels of user expertise and human–computer interaction.•We present an application for the linguistic description of player activity in a simple 2D computer game.•This application will be used for improving player experience in computer games.

Understanding player behavior has an interest to computer games researchers and developers since it allows them to improve the design and implementation of computer games and also to ensure that players have the expected experiences. Currently this knowledge is not usually reported to players as feedback, although sometimes it is already used as an analysis tool. This paper presents a novel technology for automatically generating linguistic reports and immediate feedback from actions performed by players during play sessions. These reports allow developers to provide players with a more complete and personalized feedback about their behaviors, abilities, attitudes, skills or movements. In order to show and explore the possibilities of this new technology, we have incorporated it in the core of a computer game. We have evaluated positively that the incorporation of this kind of feedback into the core of YADY computer game allows us to improve the overall player experience.