Welcome to the Activision Game Science Blog!
I’m pleased to welcome you to the unofficial and (mostly) unsanctioned Game Science Blog from the team here at Activision. We’re a group of data scientists and software engineers working at the bleeding edge of real-time data at scale in support of Activision’s plethora of game studios and business operations.
We are passionate advocates of data science and data-informed decisions, whether those decisions are one-off human-made business or design decisions, or machine-made decisions happening thousands of times per second. Activision is full of extremely bright, extremely talented people, and we are lucky to both learn from them and inform them of what is possible in the burgeoning data-driven world. Hopefully, we come together to bring you the best interactive entertainment experiences we can.
As we carve inroads into the data-tech future, which involves working through many pain points and staying on top of the latest tech, we have learned (and are constantly learning) many lessons which are likely useful to a larger audience. Hence, this blog.
Expect to see posts from a variety of members of our team. Our goal is to share lessons learned; some more informal and expository, but most probably more technical. None of the posts will be Activision-specific or nonreproducible reports on proprietary data: we will link to code on github and public datasets. We hope you’ll find our posts both informative and useful.
Activision has put a lot of effort into building a strong, vibrant, prototype-to-production analytics team and given us the space and resources to do awesome things, and we are excited to start sharing some of what we do with you.
–Will Kirwin, Activision Game Science Team