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Presentation - A Data Odyssey through Video Game Trends
My final topic lands to video games after days of research on datasets. Although myself is not a video game player, My teenage son is a regular video game player. Video games are involved in his daily routine and conversation with his friends. With more people are splashing out on games, boosting video game industry to keep on growing and booming. A data story on video games should benefit video games developers for profits and players who are curious to know what kinds of games other people are playing and popularity trends.
Although video games sound a popular topic, finding useful data sets wasn’t easy. After days of searching on all resources. I discovered two interesting datasets Popular Video Games 1980 - 2023 and Video Games Sales (1980-2020) Because the data sets are from defferent resources, values of measures and dimensions in the datasets are in differenct format. My next step is to clean the data, eliminate null values, rename, group and format field names to make the datasets usable. I came up with some ideas based on the cleaned data to create story arcs. However, I relaized the story were missing logical connection, especially an important element, call for action. I need more data sets to construct a complete story. Luckily, I find another data set Video Games Released in 2022 with new vidieo games released in 2022 and their genres. With the popularity (by count of games being played and playing), sales and new release data, I was able to complete the story with four steps: setup, conflicts, resolution and call for action. Visit Part II: Wireframes / storyboards for details.
There are three major improvements based on the feedback from the interviewees.
The data story targets video game developers and players. Some demographic statistics such as video game players gender ratio or age groups may pique the targeted audience’s intetrest. A call to video game developer for producing video games for all ages other than more variety for market needs has been added to the presentation.
I used bright colors for video games genres in visulazation charts considering the nature of video games should be enjoyable and exciting. The colors for each genre are consistent across all charts. In the popularity genre comparison viz, I only highlighted adventure game to minimized potential distraction for audience’s view. For the same reason, I filtered out other genres except the top four best seller genres. Adding verticle reference line took a long way. After some research online and playing around, I was able to do so by changing parameters in the Reference Line window (In the pop up window, In “Value” drop down menu, change to the year you would like the vertical line to be located, then select “constant” in the next drop down menu.)
As a beginner user of Shorthand, I went through the “try and fail” warm up phrase when designing the final presentation. I chose blue tone for the backgroud of the presentation so that it contrasts with the orange color of the visualizations. Except the 1st and last sections are static, most of sections are either Scrollmation or Scrollpoint. I especially like to use Scrollpoint because it sets the focus of the topics when zooming in or out on an image. It helps audience to follow along and stay engaged.
All referenced articles and images are noted on Presentation - A Data Odyssey through Video Game Trends
The final project requires unitilizing multiple digital tools and platforms such as Tableau, Github and Shothand etc. for developing and presenting the data story. It was a great opportunity to explore and experiment new ways to present data. Shorthand is a great tool for interactive presentation. I was impressed by its ability to enable creating more dynamic storytelling features. I wish I had more time to dive deeper and create a more interative and compelling data story for the project.