In collaboration with EA’s Office of the Chief Creative Office, or OCCO, the goal of Project Heidegger is to develop a system that identifies player types with the purpose of making recommendations to gamers accurately, unobtrusively, and with a high degree of personal specificity. We’re most interested in connecting previously unlinked games, franchises, and genres, and are focusing on the co-op experience. The games serving as the basis of our research and experimentation are Dead Space 3 and Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel.

Our team will form a hypothesis about what kinds of players are attracted to co-op gameplay, work with a level designer from Visceral Games to build a custom Dead Space level to test our hypothesis and gather player metrics, conduct and analyze comparative playtests of our Dead Space level and a complementary Army of Two level, and construct a functioning Origin module which will visualize for users the data we’ve collected in the form of unique recommendations.

We believe that transparency is the element presently absent from recommendation systems, and Project Heidegger hopes to build a system that will not only share telemetry data with gamers and direct them toward experiences tailored to their play-styles, but also offer to them why we’re making particular recommendations.