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.

I’ve been pretty busy recently. I moved into a new house, and I’m still busy unpacking and hitting up the local home improvement stores for new plants for the front porch. This is interesting, because I don’t know anything about plants.

My guild in World of Warcraft finally entered tier 6 content, as reported by Brandon. Even though we’ve been attuned for weeks, we made our first solid attempt at Black Temple just last night, and it was the most fun raiding I’ve had for quite a while. (Was it a conscious design decision to have all of these BT bosses’ AE attacks not have a visible effect icon? Because I tend to think “hey, am I standing in the fire?” and then I look up at my effects list to confirm it, and if I don’t see something, I assume I’m not. Additionally, when there’s an effect, boss mods can use it as a trigger and play a GET OUT OF THE FIRE, MORON sound for you. I guess that we’re playing with the big kids now, and the big kids don’t need any pesky UI to play the game for them.)

It’s GDC time. I’m not going, but my company has a presence this year. If you’re a publisher and would like to spend some money, please visit our booth this week. Even if you’re not, please watch our first gameplay video.

And finally, I’m proud to announce that I’ll be giving a talk at the ION Game Conference in Seattle later this year. It’s called “Design for Longevity,” and it’s about designing infrastructure systems and tools that will make your live team not want to kill themselves five years from now.

I just got an email from the IGDA reminding me to RSVP for their members-only party at GDC. They thoughtfully provided a link to a list of the more than 1,300 people who have RSVP’d.

That’s very interesting.

My former coworkers at KingsIsle are looking for a “data mining specialist.” The ad reads like it’s more for marketing than for design, but it’s still pretty cool that KingsIsle thinks it’s worth a slot!

This public service announcement brought to you by LinkedIn spam.

In response to OH MY GOD, WHY DOES THE GROCERY STORE WANT TO KNOW MY NAME, a bit about grocery store loyalty cards.