Mobile game recommendation using touch gestures

Abstract

Today, any Internet user can find out and download more than one hundred thousands of games on mobile app marketplaces; nevertheless, how to pick the best games out of the large pool without spending much time on tryout is very challenging. The common rank list and social recommendation approaches for discovering new games do not work well when a player wants to search for games with a particular gameplay, or he may want to find out all the slow-paced games suitable for his grandparents. There is currently no feasible way to do that because these requirements cannot be formulated in a proper text search query. In this paper, we propose a scheme that can discover mobile games with similar gameplay based on players' touch gestures while playing a game. We select 22 mobile games from 5 genres and recorded 94 touch gesture traces from 5 subjects. The evaluation results show that 1) touch gestures can serve robust signatures of gameplay as the key traits of the touch gestures from different subjects remain consistent; 2) our scheme can give reasonably accurate recommendations of similar games simply based on touch gestures.