Archive for the 'Video Games' Category

Teens Love Guitar Hero, Part Two

November 4th, 2008

(This is the second of two parts of a series on the “Teens, Video Games, and Civics” put out by the non-partisan Pew Internet & American Life Project. Part one was about the general findings of the report. Part two, in true data nerd form, will be about the methodology of the survey.)

After a two-week hiatus and feeling refreshed, I’m back. If you’ve been following the blog, part one of this series might be a little rusty. If you need to refresh your memory, feel free. (It’s not so important, though, since this post takes …

Teens Love Guitar Hero, Part One

October 10th, 2008

(Over the next few weeks I’m going to be rolling out what I call “Version 2.0″ of this blog. Basically, I’m going to start incorporating all the things I’ve learned lately about blog writing and visual thinking. The content won’t change much, but the presentation should be quite different as I roll out all the new ideas. As for this week’s post, it’s on a survey of teen video gamers, and is large enough that I’ll have to cover it in several parts. This week is on basic findings.)

My twin brother and editor Ed recently directed …

Everybody Writes, Part Two

December 14th, 2007

(This post is the second part of a two-part series on “Everybody Votes”, a channel on the Nintendo Wii dedicated to voting on everyday topics. The first part is here. If you read any of those links they’ll bring you up to speed. You might be able to make sense of this post without reading any of them, but it’d probably be a lot of hassle. So, to prevent a lot of repetition, I won’t be going over what “Everybody Votes” is any further than that, or how I got the data.)

Last time I went over …

Everybody Writes, Part One

December 6th, 2007

“Everybody Votes” is a “channel” you can tune into on your Wii, Nintendo’s latest and greatest video game console. (If you can get one that is, but that’s a subject for another post.) “Everybody Votes” is the rare combination of two loves of mine: video games and data mining.

Basically, every couple of days you can put in a vote on some random topic Nintendo comes up with. You always have a choice between two distinct options, and you must choose one or the other. If you want to say “I don’t know”, the best you can …

What’s in a Name?

July 17th, 2007

If you’ve played any amount of video games in your lifetime, you probably know first-hand that some of them have some pretty weird titles, especially the old ones. Which got me to thinking: “I wonder if there’s any pattern to it?” That is, are there any interesting patterns in old video game names?

I collected data for six (mostly older) systems. They are:

- Gameboy and Gameboy Color (GB)
- Gameboy Advance (GBA)
- Genesis
- Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
- Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)
- Turbo Graphix 16 (TG16)

This is what I found:

System
Title Count
Words (avg)
Words (median)
Words (max)
Std Dev

GBA
404
3.69
3
11
1.64

SNES
733
3.24
3
9
1.70

GB
846
3.21
3
10
1.63

Genesis
437
3.19
3
9
1.69

NES
733
2.81
2
9
1.58

TG16
97
2.40
2
8
1.36

Total …