2018-Rabbit-Hole

While doing some reading in preparation for my upcoming Writing And Editing For Gaming course, I stumbled into this wonderful article on visualizing Board Game Geek data. And from there I fell into a wonderful rabbit hole of researching tabletop gaming statistics, demographics, and visualizations. Been dealing with some stressful things in life recently, so having something really nerdy I could immerse myself in was a welcome break. Some of these statistics I had used before in my Game Studies courses, but many of these sites were new to me, especially the more current visualization projects. Continuing along this nerd-induced musing, have you heard of the information hierarchy or DIKW pyramid? The simple explanation:  we can have lots of data available to us, but we need to sort and organize it into understandable information. Then we can interpret that information to gain knowledge. And if we learn and apply that knowledge, we have attained some wisdom.

All of the data and statistics on sites like Board Game Geek, RPG Geek, ICV2, and Google Analytics are wonderful but difficult for many people to fully comprehend the impact of. All those numbers and tables can be overwhelming to process. That is why sites like this BGG Visualization, Tables on ICV2, Alexa Web traffic, and BGG/RPGG Top Lists help us visualize this data as information we can understand. We can then learn from this information and better understand how the game hobby and game industry work. Moving from lots of data to wisdom about gaming. See, you learned something from this blog, more than just about gaming and freelancing.

Reading through these facts, figures, and futures, you can really get a feel of the size and growth of the gaming hobby and gaming industry. The sites that take the time to add graphics and visualizations are faster to comprehend and put into context of the impact. Does data and visualization like this excite your inner nerd, or am I boring all of you? What wisdom do you gain from data displayed like this?

Attendance:
https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/40693/origins-attendance-up-substantially-year
https://www.ibj.com/articles/69971-gen-con-reports-record-attendance-for-downtown-gaming-bash

Classification and Taxonomy:
https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/80554/visualizing-bgg-game-database-gephi-whoa?mc_cid=1a520e3433&mc_eid=1c5c829677
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/581158/alternative-classification-board-games-long

Sales:
https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/41016/hobby-games-top-1-5-billion
https://www.tabletopgaming.co.uk/board-games/news/tabletop-projects-raked-in-85-of-the-money-made-by-games-on

Website Traffic:
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/boardgamegeek.com
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/rpggeek.com

Database Statistics:
https://boardgamegeek.com/stats.php

Database Access:
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/advsearch/boardgame
https://rpggeek.com/advsearch/rpg

Personal Game Stats:
http://bgb.diespiderdie.com/
https://www.pubmeeple.com/board-game-ranking-engine/

If you know of other fascinating visualizations or classifications of tabletop gaming statistics, especially ones that dig into the BGG and RPGG data, please let me know in the comments below so I can check them out.

 

Side Project: Tabletop Gaming Statistics

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