Unreal MCP is one of the interesting new features for Unreal Engine 3 recently demonstrated at the Game Developers Conference 2009. Unreal MCP is a set of tools for visualizing gameplay, using graphic displays such as heat maps of players’ activities within a level (see the video at the end of this post from minute 01:00 to 01:37).

However, the idea is not new, at least in the world of academic research. I list below a couple of links to publicly available scientific papers on the topic that go back as far as 2004, and appeared in Human-Computer Interaction/Computer Graphics conferences or jourrnals. 

Chittaro L., Ieronutti L.,
A Visual Tool for Tracing Behaviors of Users in Virtual Environments, Proceedings of AVI 2004: 7th International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, ACM Press, New York, May 2004, pp.40-47. [See abstract and download PDF]

Hoobler N., Humhpreys G., and Agrawala M., Visualizing Competitive Behaviors in Multi-User Virtual Environments, in Proceedings of the IEEE Visualization Conference 2004, IEEE Press, October 2004, pp. 163-170. [See abstract and download PDF]

Chittaro L., Ranon R., Ieronutti L.,
VU-Flow: A Visualization Tool for Analyzing Navigation in Virtual Environments,  IEEE Transactions on Visualization
and Computer Graphics, November 2006, Vol. 12, No. 6, pp.
1475-1485. [See abstract and download PDF]

If you like to contribute further references, feel free to add them in the comments section below.