About

Technical Description

Assets – This digital humanities project utilizes assets, in the form of our datasets. We provide both of the links to the dataset, in hyperlink form, but also a visualization of the variables, to show the relationships between them. The datasets we used are large digital collections of video games, their ratings, their consoles, and their publishers and developers. We also have pictures ethically sourced and cited from the web, to provide more of a visual aspect to our project. 

Services – The services used to create and develop this project, include Google Sites, which is our domain host. The main reason for using it is because of how straightforward it is, and its ability to collaborate live with other editors! We also utilized Deepnote as our webhost to do all of the coding for the visualizations, also because of its collaborative ability. We coded in Python, using libraries such as pandas, matplotlib, and seaborn, to develop our visualizations. Kaggle was used for our datasets, because of its large collection of public datasets that are great for EDA. 

Interface – This digital humanities project is fully accessible! All of the design choices were made with Critical Disability Theory in mind, where we used descriptive headings, kept in mind color contrast in regards to the UI, and provided alternative text for our images. You can see this, in our design, where we made sure to use colors for our text that have high contrast, allowing for readability. Our website is fully PDF/print compatible, ensuring use for screen readers. The website is also keyboard accessible, allowing you to navigate through thoroughly! We wanted to make a website that everybody could use, which influenced our decision making in regards to the UI/UX design!

Dataset Decision Making Process

In order to support our hypothesis that socio-economic events and technological advancements significantly impact the popularity and thematic trends in video games, we found it important to find a dataset of video games titles with information on release date, genre and a way to quantify its popularity. The release date information is pivotal in drawing connections between socio-economic events/technological advancements and when certain game genres were well accepted and demanded. Genre was also very important in our analysis; we can see if games of a specific genre were rated higher compared to other genres, or we can make observations on whether the gaming industry released more games of a specific genre in a certain year. We found that there were many options to measure popularity in video games, and we decided that a user-rating score would be a good representation of whether the game was popular or near the time of its release. Video games are reflective of society’s state of mind as they are shaped by socio-economic events, so we thought the number of sales is also a good indicator of game popularity. We also had the option of cross-analyzing our data sets to see the effect of socio-economic events and technological advancements have on gaming companies and user reviews. 

Challenges of using these datasets are that we are able to take into consideration sub-genres (Adventure genre can have many subgenres). We also are limited by the yearly interval of data, as well as the lack of live updates on the number of players a game currently has.