Sci/Tech The 'mouse tracks' of gamers as they play PC games - for hours and hours.

MrBrooks

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The pictures might look like the sort of 'abstract art' that changes hands for frighteningly large sums of money - and they're created with the same sort of painstaking attention to detail. But the images are actually 'mouse tracks' recording the movements of gamers' mice across their PC screens as they play games. Can you tell which is the peacerful world-building game, and which is the frenzied shoot 'em up?

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Role-playing game World of Warcraft creates this pattern in 1.2 hours of play as a gamer targets on-screen enemies with spells and magic weapons.

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Who said gaming was relaxing? Frenzied anti-terror shoot 'em up Counter Strike: Source shows the mouse moving all over the screeen as a gamer fights for his life.

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The relatively serene pace of block-building strategy game Minecraft is reflected in this pattern, where 3.9 hours of play is 'focused' on buildings in the centre of the screen.

Gamers download IOGraph software into their PCs, and it sits in the background 'recording' each mouse-stroke - often for hours. 'Apparently, there’s a bit of a tradition of using IOGraph while gaming,' writes Geekosystem. Minecraft, World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike all show strikingly different paces. 'The result is a neat little piece of abstract art that ostensibly contains some level of information about mouse movement, but does a better job of looking cool,' says blog Geekosystem, which collected the shots.
 
This is the whole article :) I figured as it was so short I'd just post it as a whole topic instead of linking to the rest of the article, as by then it'd only be another image and line of text.
 
Probably best to still post the source link. Very nice read though. I shall upload one of me playing Starcraft 2 when I get home :p

If anyone wants the program, it is free to download from here.
 
This is the article.

Link.

It was removed. As I said the whole article is on the first post. It's a shame the link no longer exists otherwise I would add it in.
 
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