Halloween Gameplay Results (With graphical analysis!)

supertechnoboy

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Halloween Gameplay Results (With graphical analysis!)

Like many on KLOV, I had a Halloween party over the weekend, and I wanted to share my gameplay popularity results. Here is a shot of the row before things got going:

arcade.jpg


This was a non-arcade oriented crowd, and the games were definitely not the biggest draw of the party. (The costumes were, of course!) As a result, the games were played only 127 times, but I think the distribution is still of significant value. The breakout is:
Donkey Kong - 37 plays
Solar Ride Pin - 29 plays
Gauntlet - 23 plays
Tron - 16 plays
Ms. Pac - 13 plays
Spy Hunter - 9 plays
If we display the data in a Pareto chart, we have this:

bar.jpg

As you can see, Donkey Kong has a large amount of action, while Spy Hunter has significantly less action. The Ms. Pac was a surprise to me. It would normally be higher. DK also snagged the top spot from the pinball, which usually wins in a "regular people" crowd. This could be because it is the newest edition to my lineup, and got a lot of additional attention because of this. A pie chart will show us percentages:

pie.jpg

With only the pin and DK, half of the people would have been happy! Finally, if I apply some really inappropriate statistical analysis, we can overlay a normal distribution curve on the game data:

normal.jpg

As you can see by this brilliant and utterly flawless analysis, Donkey Kong was played entirely too much, while Tron should have been played more! (Tron's barrier to entry for new players is formidable.) Everyone had a great time at the party, and the games performed flawlessly for a change. Overall, a very enjoyable evening.
 
haha...great post.
As I am currently working on building dashboards for my employer, I have to say that the leading expert on graphical representation of data, Stephen Few, says that pie charts are bad. Apparently they don't represent the data in a way that you can spot differences between two sets of data that are only a few percentage points apart, like you can in a bar graph. :D
 
Very entertaining post.


Reminds me of a Lisa Simpson quote:

"As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. I made a graph. See? I make a lot of graphs".
 
i think the pin got played a lot cause it's a pin. you probably could've had any pin with the same results. surprising that ms pac and DK weren't closer in amount of plays. i would think ms pac would've had a lot more.
 
Hmmm, discussions on barriers to entry, statistical analysis. Sounds like someone is working on an MBA? (or at least taking marketing and stats classes)
Took some classes several years ago in college. It took me a while to remember how to get a bell curve!
 
I do statistical analysis at my parties to. Here's my results:

Yep, people played the crap out of the Narc MAME.
Eh, I saw 2 people play Badlands for a while.
Dang, noone played much pinball except for that one dude.

(note, all of these things are spoken while laying heavily into my hillbilly accent.)

Pretty scientific huh?


My full analysis: 2 player+ games are better at parties than single player games.
 
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