Mining for gold (and platinum): PlayStation network data mining

Achievements are a common feature of modern video games. Early research efforts have attempted to classify achievements into taxonomies in order to identify achievement types and to learn about their potential affect on players, however, these studies have been constrained by small, manually collected samples of player data. This study describes a novel method of overcoming the lack of publicly-available achievement data, by scraping the PlayStation Network (PSN) for player profiles, including player achievement lists and progress in order to allow for a more informed analysis of players and their activities. Results of the application of this method have allowed us to source 30,227 player profiles, and subsequently learn that a number of factors can influence the earning of achievements, including PlayStation Plus subscriptions, player regions, and individual game achievement counts. We also present a wide range of future research applications which make use of this system to augment other existing datasets such as achievement taxonomies, sales figures, and review aggregators.