DatavisZRH #012 Data Visualization Experiments in Video Games

Data Visualization Experiments in Video Games - by Yannick Rochat --- DatavisZRH is a monthly meetup about data visualization in Zürich, Switzerland. --- From the number of remaining lives you can see on screen to the health points, the score, the timer, how many bullets you have left, the statistics of a football player or the character sheet of your elven warrior, metrics lie everywhere in video games. They bind the game experience to the rules of play. The way they are displayed has a strong influence on the game feel. These metrics and the need to visualize them dynamically, while in the game, have lead to all sorts of design experiments, usually with the goal of readability by the widest audience possible (most of them not used to statistics and data visualization). This talk will offer to review data visualization examples in both old and recent games and observe how they evolved over time. Hopefully, this exploration will allow us to draw a few lessons from these complex-but-friendly objects. --- Yannick Rochat (https://yro.ch/) is Lecturer at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) in the Department of Language and Information Sciences, where he studies networks of characters in fiction, the relation between games and code. --- June 10, 2020 --- Curation: Benjamin Wiederkehr & Luc Guillemot Event sponsored by Interactive Things https://www.interactivethings.com/