What do you think, how many moves does a player make on average per minute?
Or from another perspective: For a 2 hour game - how many moves should a player have to make on average?
What are your experienced values?
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While doing what? Are they drawing a map at the time? How much text is there to read?
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I know that it depends on a lot of different factors.
I am interested in your experiences to be able to make a rough from-to estimate.
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I would check some Club Floyd transcript (transcripts with timestamps) to have a rough estimate.
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thanks! that’s a really good idea!
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I can imagine 100 moves a minute (with familiar items and predictable terrain), and I can imagine 1 move a minute (mapping, reading extensive paragraphs). It’s a bit like saying a novel ranges from forty thousand to four million words. Can’t you describe the sort of game you have in mind a bit more? I really think there’s a lot of variation, especially when you factor in play habits (does the player pace around the game when stuck, or walk away and think)?
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If I were trying to figure this out, I’d first try to use a play transcript to calculate time to read. The general consensus–so far as I can tell–is that the average adult reads between 220 and 250 words a minute.
So, if possible, I’d set the game to “brief” mode, do a reasonably detailed playthrough, get a word count, and arrive at the average read time.
Then fudge a bit for puzzles and puzzle difficulty. That’s rough to gauge, but at least you can start with a reasonable floor.
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On the Club Floyd page (AllThingsJacq.com) I don’t see transcripts with timestamps – are they in a different place?
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Argh, I thought they had timestamps on. If the channel keeps logs with a logbot, that might help (you could ask Cluf Floyd organisers on Twitter). Failing that, you could — if you have time — just lurk in the channel so to provide a log yourself (of course turn timestamps on on your client!), you don’t need to actively participate.
Your best bet is @Jacqueline, hopefully she still has raw logs!
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Most sessions start at 2pm EST and end at 4pm. If you see an acknowledgement in the transcript that it’s the normal stopping time, 2 hours have passed by that point. Not perfect, but might give you enough to measure out the average over that chunk.
Also, be aware that it may be a bit skewed anyway. Typically, these games aren’t played collaboratively, so the pause to discuss the game in between commands may slow the rate of commands.
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I’m planning to publish another “Gent Stickman Vs Evil Meat Hand” boring post, now with statistics about player’s commands that I think could be useful for others, as I think they would be for me.
There is not too much information out there about this kind of so important things as number of commands typed without specific response implemented, ammount of movements needed to finish (max, min, avg), time needed to finish or leaving without winning, number of deaths in a session, …
This stuff of movements speed is very interesting too, and perhaps a bit difficult to categorize to obtain valuable information from the data: Actions repeated “as a robot” to reach certain point, actions made by betatesters vs real players, …
Any idea for this kind of statistics would be welcome!
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I got a beta testing transcript from @faf where he noted his start, intermediate and end times. Here are the results.
The transcript has a total of 6600 words (including 540 words of commands and comments). With 184 moves, that’s an average of ~33 words of game text per move or about 170 words per minute.
I think it would make a lot of sense to divide the moves into Movement, Examine, Wait and Other.
If I get more transcripts with times I will publish the data here as well. But it can be a bit slow at the moment, because I don’t have so much time for it due to competition deadline.
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This is excellent data, especially the categorization. I will not add more not to spoil the game I have beta-played, but I will say tmp paints a truthful picture of how I felt the game was flowing.
Food for thought for developers!
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I replied to Olaf, but figured I’d reply here as well.
(And apologies, I don’t come to the forums much - just saw this when I came to post something.)
I have a ****-ton of transcripts, but I’m afraid they don’t have timestamps (not even in the raw transcripts, used to generate the online versions), except during the lulls. So, there are timestamps when no one is doing anything, but not when players enter commands. The other thing about CF is that I’ve found that, when you play as a group, you play a lot more slowly.
Sorry to not be of more help!
Jacqueline
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