Using Google Events to Track "Fun Rating"

Inspired by the Flash Love Letter Part 2 by Daniel Cook, I've included a fun rating in my latest game Word War I. The Word War I game has five stages and the rating is shown to the user once between one of these stages. The stage to show the rating is chosen randomly before the game starts and is only shown the first time you play. The player is given a dialog that asks them to rate the game 1 to 5, with 1 being hate it and 5 being loving it. I chose to store the rating by the stage that the user is on and the difficulty that they are playing. So in Google Analytics, I can see how many Fun Ratings I have and see what the rating is at each stage of the game. GA also shows the combined average of all the scores.

Example Data


This chart is showing 1034 votes over a one week period and the average fun rating is 3.12, which means according to the Flash Love Letter that I probably shouldn't charge anyone for this gaming experience :) Interesting that the players who were shown the rating later in the game tended to give it higher ratings, probably would be true for most games. One really cool thing about this being Google Analytics is you can use the Dimension drop down to further break down the average rating to see how your game is doing by a continent, browser, ect... . Europeans are giving the game a much lower score, 2.95, than Africans, 3.5, and people in Woodstock only think it is worth a 1 but people in Baltimore love it 5.

How To Use Event Tracking

Follow my previous post on including the swc files and add the import statements and create the tracker object. Then at the location in the game where you want to track an event add the following code:
//trackEvent(category:String,
  action:String,
  label:String = null,
  value:Number):Boolean

tracker.trackEvent("Word War I",
  "Fun Rating",
  currentLevel.type + gameStage.stageURL,
  rating);
The trackEvent function takes four parameters. The first parameter is the event category, for the category I used the Game name so in the GA control panel I will see all the events for "Word War I" listed in the same area. The second parameter is the action, I called my action "Fun Rating." The third parameter is the label, the label I used is the location the user is in the game and the difficulty they are playing. The label is useful for tracking where the user was when they submitted this Fun Rating. The last parameter is the actual rating the user submitted.

Tracking Events vs Page Views

The benefit of events is that you can assign a value to the event. The values are automatically averaged for you. Events should be used for things like average playtime or to see how many people use a certain item. Make sure you don't send too many events from your game, there is a limit on the number of events and page views you can send in one session. On Word War I also created an Event for trackacking how many games a user plays. The number of times played is stored in a SharedObject and incremented each time they click a difficulty level to start a game. I am trying to see how many players only play once versus play multiple times.

The benefit of the pageView is you can setup goals and see how far users are progressing and where they are dropping off. I've found the Funnel Visualization to be the most useful feature for seeing where I should make changes.

A Note on Goal Funnels

I setup goals for this game to see how far the average user was making it in the game, but I sent out the pageView "gameOver" whether they finished all the levels or were killed on the first level. The funnel visualization graph started showing that everyone who finished the first level then went on to finish the game, which I know isn't true because the Hard level is almost impossible to finish. So make sure you send out a different pageView url for "gameOverKilled" versus "gameOverFinishedGame."



Play Word War I and other Typing Games at http://www.onlytypinggames.com

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New Game: Word War I

The last few weeks I've been busy developing a game for the Word Play competition. It is inspired by the old Paratroopers game. The paratroopers are letters and to shoot them down you have to type the word that the paratroopers are forming. Which would be easy except some of the letters are missing. Anyways, I tried out new web based screen capture program called Screenr and here is a short video showing the first level of Word War I:

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