Software helps assess the 'training value' of games.

Measuring the training value of a videogame often has been an improvised endeavor, where engineers and programmers create their own--often not credible--assessment tools.

Web-based programs now are being introduced to collect, analyze and share game data.

Metrics Element lets users gather any type of information that can be measured in a game, and present it in any desired format, says Larry Mellon, vice president of engineering and chief architect for Emergent Game Technologies, based in Calabasas, Calif.

Currently, games are evaluated by dropping massive amounts of data into "terabyte warehouses" and mining the data to figure out what it means, he says.

That system is proving futile as games are becoming hugely complex, he says. "World of Warcraft," for example, has 7 million people playing worldwide. When things go wrong, simply collecting the information isn't sufficient for understanding what's causing the problems, says Mellon.

"What we've done with our metrics system is allow people to go into the application code directly and drop in a probe that describes what they're trying to measure," says Mellon. Metrics Element allows users to pull the information directly from the game on any system to a "dashboard" that aggregates it and produces charts that show the trends of what's happening in the game, based upon what a user is interested in seeing.

For example, to learn why players frequently "die" in a game once they reach a certain level, Metrics users can deploy a one-line ASCII text probe to search for such instances, and the system automatically graphs or charts the results.

"A big part of our design is to make data actionable by giving you these summary views, distributing it via the Web to everybody on the team and then allowing you to track changes," says Mellon. So when developers fix the problem and make a new version of the game, they can rerun the test and see if there are any changes.

"Serious games are in need of actionable data even more than games for fun, because now I'm trying to change people's behavior in the real world by training them," says Mellon.

The commercial release of Metrics Element is scheduled for the first half of 2007.