Design statement for Assignment 1

Gaming has always  had an influence in my life, in fact the only reason I became a programmer is because of gaming. I've always wondered the mechanics behind a game and saw what was possible with code. Unlike the world we live in, with code we can create or recreate almost anything and this is anywhere from a building to universes that are populated with people. 

I have discovered in 2010 I signed up to a website called "raptr", I will provide a link below. This website keeps tracks of which games you played, how many hours you played each game and separates the games into genres. After going through all the hours and games, I noticed that I have spent over 1000 hours in front of a screen every year, seem crazy but if you think about it, that is only 2 hours a day for 1 year. 

Since visualization was the whole point of this project, I wanted to have a design that was simple. Something that didn't over complicate the data that was being shown. How to show a data set with the variables; year, games, hours and genres. When I think of games, I can pictures the games that are sitting in my room, piled on top of one another due to the fact that I don't have book ends. They looks like a stacked bar graph and normally would be in alphabetical order if I wasn't in a hurry to play a game.

Kinda looks like this:

The issue with a stack bar graph is that it's hard to put it on the screen, it has to be at the bottom for the graph is getting stacked upwards. The only fix to that solution is to make it upside down. This way I can put it to the top of the screen where a person eyes are naturally drawn. 

I made the games randomize there position because the stacks in my rooms are always different.

The point to this dataset was to see which games I played the most and what genres they fall under. The legend at the bottom of the screen shows which colour is what genres and when you click on either the genre in the legend or a game, it will grey out every genre except the one that you click. This way the user can clearly see how many hours I have played a genre and how it has changed over the years. 

To add further detail when you hover over a game, at the bottom of the screen it will show the hours I have played as well as the game title. Furthermore the game that you hover over will turn white in all years. This way you can compare the amount of hours I have played over the three year. In the picture below you can see in 2010 (which is were my cursor is) that I only played 50 hour of Minecraft. But in 2011 and 2012 you can see I have spend more time on the game.

After graphing this data a question did stand that I would like to solve. What does this all mean? When looking at the data, the obvious is that I used to play more shooters in the past, then I do now.What does that mean? 

After some digging, I found an article by Richard Bartle  that goes into gamers Personality types (Gamification Process and Game Design.) I will go into this during my presentation because this blog is meant only to explain my design choices.

Here is my project for those who want to see it.

Citation:

. ratr. http://raptr.com/ (accessed February 6, 2013).

Gamification, "Personality Types." Accessed February 7, 2013. http://www.gamification.org/wiki/Personality_Types.

Richard, Bartle. "HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS." . http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm (accessed February 7, 2013).