Toward Visualization for Games: Theory, Design Space, and Patterns

Electronic games are starting to incorporate in-game telemetry that collects data about player, team, and community performance on a massive scale, and as data begins to accumulate, so does the demand for effectively analyzing this data. In this paper, we use examples from both old and new games of different genres to explore the theory and design space of visualization for games. Drawing on these examples, we define a design space for this novel research topic and use it to formulate design patterns for how to best apply visualization technology to games. We then discuss the implications that this new framework will potentially have on the design and development of game and visualization technology in the future.

1 Introduction

Video and computer games have a long history of using visual representations of data to convey information to the player; for example, colored bars are routinely used to present vitals—health, energy, and magical power—of the player character and are accordingly often called “healthbars” (Fig. 1a), and many games use overhead maps to show the locations of entities in the game world. Some games have already gone beyond such simple visual representations and are employing statistical data graphics to present more data to the player. For example, the first version of the classic SimCity [56] game from 1989 used chloropleth maps to convey metrics such as crime rate in a particular city (Fig. 1b). Fig. 1. Examples of visualizations in genres ranging from role-playing games (<italic>World of Warcraft</italic>), construction and management simulations (<italic>SimCity</italic>), and first-person shooters (<italic>Call of Duty: Black Ops</italic> and <italic>Halo: Reach</italic>).