ABOUT ME
I’m Professor for Game Computing at the Johannes Kepler University Linz and hold positions at the Eindhoven University of Technology and Ontario Tech University. My research interests lie at the intersection of games user research, data analytics, and information visualization. My work particularly centers on understanding player behavior in games and on researching methods to explore and communicate the collected data to derive actionable insights for game design and development. As part of this, I’m working on data visualizations to support the analysis of increasingly large-scale player behavioral datasets used in game analytics. My work has been published in international journals and conference proceedings, such as CHI, CHI PLAY, FDG, Computers & Graphics, and Entertainment Computing.

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Recent Book

Data Analytics Applications in Gaming and Entertainment seeks to provide a cross section of current data analytics applications in game production. It is intended as a companion for practitioners, academic researchers, and students seeking knowledge on the latest practices in game data mining. A total of 25 authors from industry and academia have contributed 12 chapters covering topics such as player profiling, approaches for analyzing player communities and their social structures, matchmaking, churn prediction and customer lifetime value estimation, communication of analytical results, and visual approaches to game analytics. Read more ...

Latest Publications

Live Feedback for Training Through Real-Time Data Visualizations: A Study with League of Legends
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6 (CHI PLAY) [DOI] [Research Gate]
The Importance of Dashboard Elements During Esports Matches to Players, Passive-Viewers and Spectator-Players
Stan J. P. van Kempen, Erik D. van der Spek, Günter Wallner
Entertainment Computing – ICEC 2022 [DOI] [Research Gate]
Ethermal-Lightweight Thermal Feedback for VR Games
Bas A Plijnaer, Günter Wallner, Regina Bernhaupt
2022 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) [DOI] [PDF] [Research Gate]
[see full list of publications]

Professional Activities (Selection)

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