  Understanding how players interact with the mobile game app on smartphone
devices is important for game experts to develop and refine their app products.
Conventionally, the game experts achieve their purposes through intensive user
studies with target players or iterative UI design processes, which can not
capture interaction patterns of large-scale individual players. Visualizing the
recorded logs of users' UI operations is a promising way for quantitatively
understanding the interaction patterns. However, few visualization tools have
been developed for mobile game app interaction, which is challenging with
multi-touch dynamic operations and complex UI. In this work, we fill the gap by
presenting a visualization approach that aims to understand players'
interaction patterns in a multi-touch gaming app with more complex interactions
supported by joysticks and a series of skill buttons. Particularly, we identify
players' dynamic gesture patterns, inspect the similarities and differences of
gesture behaviors, and explore the potential gaps between the current mobile
game app UI design and the real-world practice of players. Three case studies
indicate that our approach is promising and can be potentially complementary to
theoretical UI designs for further research.
