We Can Fix That with Data

Looks like the Wordpress upgrade broke some stuff. Will fix within the next few days.

• “For past four weeks, TiVo has been using its second-by-second audience measurement to determine which [American Idol] performers had the highest and lowest viewership. It turns out, this information […] is highly predictive of which contestant will be voted off. Viewers tend to rewind and watch their favorite performances multiple times, while fast-forwarding through the ones they don’t like. These viewing preferences correlate with voting patterns …” (via Marginal Revolution)
• Pirates of the Burning Sea’s data service API. Are any players doing cool stuff with it yet?
• Gamasutra interviews Dave Sirlin on the rebalancing of Street Fighter. He’s gotten tons of press on that gig, and I haven’t seen much that’s terribly applicable — until now.
  

  My biggest secret is that, even though I have a math degree from MIT, it’s not about math at all. If I was going to make a fighting game from scratch, starting with nothing, there’d be a tiny bit of math to make sure that, if you make them block a move, you can’t block it again to prevent infinite loops, so there’s already a little bit of maths done for me in Super Street Fighter, but when it comes to things like, should this guy’s priority be a little bit better or not?

  It’s just this holistic approach. We know the results from all these tournaments from all these years, and it’s just having an intuition of what a tweak is going to do.

  But NO, YOU NEED EDUCATION! Even glorified worldbuilders need math degrees.

• Raiding Represented in Mathmatical Graphs. (Hahaha.)

[…] what if we want to include data visualization as an integral part of the site, not just an isolated figure or an interactive chart? When we’re designing interfaces for browsing data-driven sites, it’s valuable to be able to create navigation elements that are also visualization tools. We can keep the user informed as they explore, so they can make better decisions about what they’re looking at and what they’re clicking on.

Creating charts with CSS. What it looks like.

Interesting.

Have you seen any other player survey “innovations” recently?