Category: Beautiful Data (Page 1 of 3)

Pornhub Metrics are Deeply Fascinating Look at Worldwide Trends (SFW)

January 12, 2015 / Damion Schubert

If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t get offended by the notion of porn, then you’ll likely be as intrigued as I am by PornHub’s annual statistical review, which gives in-depth analysis to the trends of their viewership. The report is here, and is, at least visually, safe for work. The previous year is here. I realize that some may find the topic distasteful but, truth be told, large data analysis like this really IS what gets me all excited. (Seriously, I’d equally love to see this kind of statistical infographic breakdown of the board game database I discussed yesterday. Because I’m a massive data nerd)

It’s also somewhat interesting to see parallels between that entertainment industry, and the gaming industry – which makes sense, to some extent. If you think about it, we’re all competing for the scarce spare time of the public. One clear parallel is that, much like gaming services, PornHub also sees serious declines during major sporting events. Among other interesting tidbits.

The Best and Worst Board Games

January 11, 2015 / Damion Schubert

538.com is long one of my favorite sites, as it was founded by Nate Silver, who is of course the statistics savant who made a name for himself pretty much nailing the last two presidential elections based on a lot of disparate polling data. Since that time, they’ve left their home on the New York Times and expanded their mandate to pretty much do statistical analysis of anything anywhere there happens to be a large amount of data to examine.

Recently, they gave this treatment to Board Games, utilizing the database housed on BoardGameGeek. Of particular note, they examined the best-ranked board game in the database (Twilight Struggle) and then delved into the list of the worst. The latter list tends to contain a lot of passive aggressive hate for classics like Candyland and.Monopoly, both because these ancient bits of family fare are poorly designed by modern hardcore standards, but also because board game geeks tend to have quite hipster attitudes towards any game you can pick up at Target. Both articles are great reads. Continue reading

An Interesting Application of Logging

May 6, 2009 / Damion Schubert

I often spout the wisdom to log everything, data mine everything, and have metrics on everything you possibly can. You never know what the information will be useful for.

Here is an application I hadn’t considered: Using the information to see how much a given reviewer actually played the game. Of course, if you do so, you might want to be sure the data is correct.

Are You A Data Nerd?

February 16, 2009 / Damion Schubert

Man, this is cool of Sony – releasing 60 Terabytes of game data to game researchers so they can investigate play patterns inside a modern MMO. If this sort of thing excites you, you may have the right frame of mind to be an MMO designer.

Hopefully the researchers will find some good stuff, and we’ll get to talk about some of their findings here. Also hopefully,other games follow suit, so we can detect trends between MMOs, and identify what is universal vs. differing from online world to online world.

Original comments thread is here.

WoW Class PvP Metrics

March 7, 2008 / Damion Schubert

My wife pointed these out to me – MMO designers who like metrics will probably find themselves mesmerised as well.

This blog runs metrics on the Armory to determine the class makeup of teams at different Arena ratings. (For the uninitiated, 1500 is an average, starter rating, whereas 1800 is considered good and 2200 is considered wtfpwnage). As an example, you can see that Druids and Warlocks own in 2v2, whereas locks are average in 5v5 and druids are considered kinda crappy. Continue reading

Raids: Asynchronous Gameplay and the Great Race

November 16, 2007 / Damion Schubert

On a personal level, I just wanted to note that last night, my guild finally dropped Lady Vashj (one of the more insanely complicated fights in WoW), after well over a month of trying two nights a week to get her down. Somehow, last night, everything just clicked, and on our third attempt, we beat her down with 20 people standing at the end.

This cements our status as the #1 guild on our server, according to WoWJutsu, which to our guild, is the really important thing. See, at the top end of the raiding game, there exists fierce competition on each server to be the best raiding guild, where ‘best’ is defined primarily by number of boss kills, with extra weight given to first kills. I like to call this competition the ‘Great Race’ – largely because it sounds pretentious. Anyway, WoWJutsu has codified this into a score for each guild (by scraping the Armory, which is admittedly imperfect at best), and is now considered by many raids to be the definitive WoW scoreboard. Continue reading

XBox Achievements Lead to Higher Review Scores and Sales

October 17, 2007 / Damion Schubert

My boy Geoff has been busy: his new company has put out the following story.

Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) has just released a revealing new study based on the Microsoft Xbox 360 Achievement System. The study concluded that, in general, game titles that have a higher volume of Accomplishments correlate with both a higher Metacritic Metascore and higher gross sales in the United States. The data also indicated that not all developers are utilizing these design options. In fact, 29% of all Accomplishments are Completion Accomplishments; one of the easiest to develop and integrate – leaving way for additional opportunities within the Accomplishment categories.

WoWJutsu

July 5, 2007 / Damion Schubert

Both Sara and Brandon have links and discussions to WoWJutsu, which is simply Crazy Cool with Cream of Awesome Sauce. It tries to create a Guild Ranking system for raid progression based on character loot in the Armory. It’s not perfect – Sara’s post outlines some of the deficiencies of the system – but it’s an extremely impressive use of the limited data that Armory exposes.

Unfortunately, Europe’s not displayed, so we don’t know if misogyny pays off yet.