GraphJam Side A · Music & pop culture in charts
The Plate Archive16 charts

Games, Players and Sport, in Charts

Charts about games, which are the one subject that arrives with its own scoring system.

Sixteen charts about playing and watching. Games are the one subject in this archive that arrive pre-quantified, a score, a level, a win rate, which ought to make them the easiest thing here to chart honestly. Mostly the collection ignores that and plots the player instead.

The unfairness charts

Probability of I-Shaped Tetris Block Appearing when I Need it is the collection’s best entry and it is wrong on purpose. The piece distribution in Tetris is uniform; the chart plots a shortage that does not exist. What it actually measures is attention, you notice the absence of the piece you need and not the presence of the others, and that is a real cognitive effect drawn as a complaint about a game.

Why you always lose at video games is linked from two sites, the same argument generalised. Reasons to Play Tetris answers the question the first chart raises. What I Do When I Can’t Beat A Level In A Video Game is a response table, filed under food because of what the largest slice is.

Unfairness is easy to draw and hard to quantify, which is why these charts assert it rather than measure it. The one corner of gaming where the unfairness is published as a number is the casino floor — the house edge of each game, stated as a rate and costed per hour.

The player, profiled

A Gamer’s Buying Guide is linked from two sites, and is a purchasing chart rather than a play chart. What World of Warcraft players desperately need is a needs assessment. Not Tonight Honey, I’m Raiding and Hes holding out for some good tank and spank are both from August 2010, both with the image lost, and both assume a reader who knows raid vocabulary, which dates them more precisely than their timestamps do.

How people use the ‘crouch’ on first person shooters is a mechanics chart, and the only entry here that plots what players actually do with an input rather than how they feel about it.

Games before the console

Video games played in the 80’s, published as its own plate with four referring domains, is the collection’s most-linked chart and the one furthest from its own present: a 2008 chart looking back twenty years, which is the same distance we are now looking back at it.

Distribution of Ghosts in Pac Land takes an arcade game and treats its enemy placement as a spatial dataset. Simon Says is about a toy that was itself a memory test, plotted as a memory test.

Sport, from the seats

Five charts here are about sport and not one of them is about playing it. Ego of NFL players is a ranking of a quantity nobody can measure. Football According to John Madden is a chart about commentary rather than football. Before they were fantasy football Commissioners… is linked from two sites, and is about administration.

Popularity of Curling and Conclusions you come to watching Ice Dancing both arrive within four days of each other in late February 2010, during the Vancouver Winter Olympics, two readers, independently, plotting the same experience of watching a sport they had not thought about for four years and would not think about again for another four. Neither image survived, which is a shame, because as a pair they are the collection’s most precise piece of dating.

Charts here
16
Images recovered
6
Published as plates
1
Referring domains
22
First posted
May 2008
Last posted
Aug 2010

The charts

In publication order. Sides run in tens, the way a record does. A chart marked as a plate has its own page and its own retrospective; the rest are published here, at the addresses they held when they were posted.

  1. A1

    A Gamer’s Buying Guide

    · Drawn by pommes · 2 domains still link here

  2. A2

    Simon Says

    · Drawn by Funkee_One · image not recovered

  3. A3

    Distribution of Ghosts in Pac Land

    · Drawn by David D · image not recovered

  4. A4

    Video games played in the 80’s

    · Drawn by ronald kochman · 4 domains still link here · published as a plate

  5. A5

    Before they were fantasy football Commissioners…

    · Drawn by #9 · 2 domains still link here

  6. A6

    Reasons to Play Tetris

    · Drawn by Margaret Carrie

  7. A7

    Football According to John Madden

    · Drawn by Inturnmike · image not recovered

  8. A8

    Probability of I-Shaped Tetris Block Appearing when I Need it

    · Drawn by Lucas

  9. A9

    What World of Warcraft players desperately need

    · Drawn by WalRoss · image not recovered

  10. A10

    Ego of NFL players

  11. Side B
  12. B1

    How people use the ‘crouch’ on first person shooters

    · Drawn by lolzmasta · image not recovered

  13. B2

    Popularity of Curling

    · image not recovered

  14. B3

    Conclusions you come to watching Ice Dancing

    · image not recovered

  15. B4

    Why you always lose at video games

    · 2 domains still link here · image not recovered

  16. B5

    Not Tonight Honey, I’m Raiding

    · Drawn by zombiehunter509 · image not recovered

  17. B6

    Hes holding out for some good tank and spank

    · image not recovered

Queries answered

What is in this collection?

Sixteen charts about video games, board games and sport, drawn between May 2008 and August 2010. One, Video games played in the 80’s, is published as its own plate and is linked from four sites.

What is the Tetris block chart?

Probability of I-Shaped Tetris Block Appearing when I Need it, from November 2008. It plots a perceived unfairness that is measurably not real, the piece distribution is uniform, which makes it a chart about attention rather than about Tetris.

Why is sport in the same collection as video games?

Because the archive’s sport charts are about spectating and fandom rather than about play, which puts them with the gaming material. There were too few of either to stand alone.

Which sport charts are here?

Ego of NFL players, Football According to John Madden, Before they were fantasy football Commissioners…, Popularity of Curling and Conclusions you come to watching Ice Dancing. Two of the five arrive in February 2010, during a Winter Olympics.

Why do some entries have no image?

Every original chart image was hosted on a service that no longer serves them, so a surviving copy had to be found for each one. Where none survived, the entry keeps its title, date and address rather than a substitute image.