Replacing your gearbox at 100 mph: How live games monitor and change with millions playing

Description

Games move fast. In order to adapt to a large population, developers make use of telemetry coming from the players, both to ensure that the game is performing as expected and to get an idea of how the game is being played. This data is often surprisingly rich. Because the players exist in a simulated world, extremely fine-grained detail about how a player interacts with that world, such as their location, what they’re looking at, and what they’re carrying can all be used to fuel decision making by the game’s designers.

Jon Manning and Paris Buttfield-Addison explore how video games use telemetry and analytics to monitor and change their state, live, with millions and millions of players engaged at the same time. They dive into the types of telemetry that games use, how they relate to the world outside of games, and how games go beyond and make changes on the fly, stay performant, and monitor everything from suspected-gaze (position of eyes) to input speed.

Games can teach the software world a lot about performance, monitoring, change, and beyond. Jon and Paris outline current best practices for gathering large amounts of data from ongoing user activity, finding the best modifications to make in the analysis of that data, and how to roll out changes while hundreds of thousands of users are right in the middle of the game. You’ll learn how real-time systems can be monitored, modified, and deployed on the fly, and how to apply the same techniques to non-game environments.