With a background in software production, Christina Chen is a thinker who knows the importance of data. She was always keen on working in the games industry, however, and that desire came to fruition when she co-founded independent Australian startup Surprise Attack Games, which has racked up multiple titles under its publication belt since its 2013 debut. In four short years, the face of gaming has changed considerably; we’ve seen a proliferation of virtual reality, the resurgence of nostalgic hardware, and subscriptions have become as mainstream as Mario. As video games make the shift from ‘products’ to ‘services’, Chen believes modern game designers—particularly independent designers—have a lot to benefit from understanding their audience. Second Sight is a tool she’s been working on to help designers keep track of their game’s performance, and the way she sees it, it just might make optimising player experience as easy as breezing through levels with a super star.
Gameranx: Tell us about yourself. How did you get involved in the games industry? Were you working in data analytics beforehand?
Christina Chen: I was working for Microsoft and always wanted to get into the games industry. My transferrable skills would mostly match a producer position, as in Microsoft I had been leading a development team to produce a piece of software. I looked around and another ‘Microsoftie’ (that’s what we called ourselves) was leading the PopCap studio in Shanghai at the time, so I found an introduction and got a senior producer job there.
I wasn’t specifically working on analytics at that time, because seven years ago everyone was still trying to figure out what to do with data. We were beginning to understand that it was important because when you switch to “game as a service” you need data to tell you what players are doing in your game, so you can continue optimising their experience.
“Seven years ago, everyone was trying to figure out what to do with data. I’m convinced that modern designers need data skills if they want to compete globally.”
Interestingly enough, when I was working in Shanghai the Chinese game companies were far more advanced in analytics then we were, and it was probably because free-to-play had already been the dominant model there for a while. I learned a lot from those Chinese companies, and along with our own development in the field I started becoming more efficient combining game design and analytics. I’m now convinced that modern designers and producers need these data skills if they want to compete globally!
Gameranx: In your own words, what is Second Sight? How long have you been working on it? It sounds like a special ability you’d acquire in a game!
Chen: Second Sight is an insights tool aimed at developers who don’t have time or the knowledge to interpret the raw graphs and numbers they get from an analytics tool. It imports your data from your existing analytics tool, does our data-crunching magic on it, then tells you exactly what you need to improve in an easy-to-understand manner. Just imagine you go to a doctor complaining something’s wrong; normal analytics tools are like the pathologists who will do blood tests and so on and hand over a test result full of numbers you don’t understand. We’re like the doctor who know how to read those tests and tell you what’s wrong and what the treatment should be.
I spent a year throwing the concept around and developing ideas, and then when I decided to move ahead with it I worked on it seriously for at least another year. This project has consumed quite a lot of my life!
Gameranx: Out of 20 aspiring entrepreneurs, you were selected to attend the Startupbootcamp in Barcelona last year. What was that like? What key messages did you take away?
Chen: It was such a great experience! It was instrumental in helping me understanding how to get user feedback earlier and validate faster. Implementing a data solution is expensive, so without this learning from Barcelona I would have dragged myself through implementing an expensive product without getting any customers and validating my assumptions beforehand. Another key takeaway for me was that we could stand on the global stage. Even though we were a very young company, we stood there with all those European startups and decided we were not that bad! We came very close to getting in the accelerator program, too.
Gameranx: Second Sight uses ‘gamified visualisation’ for a more user-friendly data interface. Gamification, especially in today’s app-saturated market, seems like a great idea. Can you tell us more about how it works?
Chen: We’re still working it out. Ultimately we want to make data fun, but using the visual language of games to display data is very tricky. For example, we might want to map a player’s journey through your game and show you that they have encountered an obstacle just after level 3, because the data is showing a huge dropoff of player engagement at that point.
That kind of fully gamified visual was where we wanted to go initially, but early feedback told us that this could cause confusion for our clients, especially if the visuals look very different from the client’s actual game.
“We want to make data fun. We’re leaning towards game mascots and symbols to represent various things, but will eventually include things like levels.”
The developer would be like, well, are you showing me a player’s progress through my game or through someone else’s? We learned to be very careful with the balance of game visual vs easy-to-understand data. We’re currently leaning towards using fun game mascots and symbols to represent various things, but will eventually be more gamified and include things like levels for our customers to advance through.
Gameranx: Interestingly, Second Sight also uses behavioural analysis and looks at how players feel about the games they’re playing. Will this be like Steam with a comment/rating system, or something completely different? What kind of scale do you envisage?
Chen: We want to democratise every developer’s access to data with or without a huge data team. Every developer deserves to know—and should know!—what players are doing and how they’re feeling in their games. Comments and reviews are an excellent tool, but they often only represent a vocal minority.
“Comments and reviews are excellent, but often represent a vocal minority. We want to see the silent majority.”
What we want to let you see is the silent majority. Who are the people loving your game to death? Who are the people who can’t even get past the first level? We want you to really, really see these people. Technically speaking, that involves a lot of stats and machine intelligence, but we want our customers to do the fun stuff of creating their game and leave us to do the data crunching.
There’s nothing completely like us at the moment. And we want to be the tool for every smaller developers who want to understand their players.
Gameranx: You’ve designed this platform primarily with independent game developers in mind. As an additional layer of data, how will Second Sight help them strategise more effectively in terms of marketing, development and beyond?
Chen: We live and breathe the independent game developer space—the previous company I co-founded is Surprise Attack, an independent game publisher! Ultimately we want to help independent game developers in two ways. First, we’ll save them time and money by helping them to prioritise what they need to work on with some confidence based on solid data. Second, we want to increase their monetisation by helping them to make their players happier. In other words, if we can double or even triple your monetisation while halving the time you spend on analytics and optimisation, that would make us very happy.
Gameranx: Player/consumer data is being monitored at an increasing rate across all gaming platforms. Steam tracks hours played, and now recommends games you might be interested in based on previous games played. Sony and Microsoft have star rating systems, and also make recommendations. With Second Sight, do you think there will be any concerns with respect to data privacy?
Chen: Yes, data privacy is a serious concern. We anonymise user data across our entire platform, and we will give developers the ability to erase the data of specific customers if they are requested to do so. We’ll also implement strong security to guard our data, of course.
Gameranx: Second Sight is currently in a free early access program. Where can interested developers sign up?
Chen: Please sign up here: http://secondsight.io/go/early-access/, and we’ll hand-hold you through the process and make sure you’re comfortable and can get value from our system.
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Gameranx thanks Christina Chen for her time and making this interview possible.
