ISSS608 2016 17 T1 Project Team 1 Report

ISSS608 2016-17 T1 Project Team 1

Proposal

Poster

Application

Report

Motivation

As students trained in Visual Analytics, we have volunteered to help them provide user-friendly and informative visualizations to cater to its users by utilizing visualizations tools and tapping on our knowledge gained from school, work, independent learning and by referencing reputable resources in the analytics industry.

The game industry data has attracted gamers such as ourselves to to apply insightful visualization techniques in order to have a better understanding about the gaming industry. It provides a sense of fulfillment whenever a new discovery is made. (e.g. Nintendo’s Wii was a one-hit wonder in the period of 06-09. Presently, it no longer generates any revenue). As both gamers and data analysts we feel a mix of emotions ranging from sadness to happiness. Sadness knowing that gamers such as ourselves have caused this and also what we used to play no longer exists (Wii Sports, Wii Boxing, Wii Tennis) and at the same time we feel a sense of happiness coming from the discoveries made.

We would like to empower users to be able to use our visualizations tools and experience what we have in a fun an interactive manner which presently does not exist. The power of knowing and understanding beats any other feeling in the world. Our aim is to give you this intangible form of satisfaction.

Present Visualizations: Vgchartz

The present visualizations which can be found on Vgchartz, are not as user friendly and interactive as many end-users would have hoped for.

A static visualization on the top performing Platforms by Region An interactive visualization on the top performing Platforms by Region and Year


These graphs are visually pleasing but have limited interactivity. A user may want to see how a platform is performing and see which games are the top performer, however, they are limited by the "interactive-ness" of changing the year and region. They are also not intuitive and easy to decipher.

Design Methodology

At the beginning of our project, we discussed a lot about our application framework. At last we decided to use the object-oriented framework for our application. Object-oriented (OO) application frameworks are a promising technology for reifying proven software designs and implementations to reduce the cost and improve the quality of software. A framework is a reusable, “semi-complete” application that can be specialized to produce custom applications. And the three features of object-oriented framework are:
Modularity -- Frameworks enhance modularity by encapsulating volatile implementation details behind stable interfaces. Framework modularity helps improve software quality by localizing the impact of design and implementation changes. This localization reduces the effort required to understand and maintain existing software.
Reusability -- The stable interfaces provided by frameworks enhance reusability by defining generic components that can be reapplied to create new applications. Framework reusability leverages the domain knowledge and prior effort of experienced developers to avoid re-creating and re-validating common solutions to recurring application requirements and software design challenges. Reuse of framework components can yield substantial improvements in programmer productivity, as well as enhance the quality, performance, reliability, and interoperability of software.
Extensibility -- A framework enhances extensibility by providing explicit hook methods that allow applications to extend its stable interfaces. Hook methods systematically decouple the stable interfaces and behaviours of an application domain from the variations required by instantiations of an application in a context. Framework extensibility is essential to ensure timely customization of new application services and features.
Inversion of control -- The run-time architecture of a framework is characterized by an “inversion of control”. This architecture enables authorized application processing steps to be customized by event handler objects that are invoked via the framework's reactive dispatching mechanism. When events occur, the framework's dispatcher reacts by invoking hook methods on pre-registered handler objects, which perform application-specific processing on the events. Inversion of control allows the framework (rather than each application) to determine which set of application-specific methods to invoke in response to external events (such as window messages arriving from end-users or packets arriving on communication ports). Based on the theory, here’s our application framework:

At the home page, you can find the information about our team as well as the method to contact us.
Besides these two pages, we have 5 main features. To access the 5 features, you have two methods: one is to click at the picture in the middle of the home page, second is to find the dropdown menu under the navigation bar named feature. The five main features are:
- Dashboard – To display video game sales data in a fun and interactive manner. A unique visualization to help you view data from a different perspective!
- Radar Chart – To display video game sales data in a fun and interactive manner. Filter to your hearts content and spot the trends and anomalies within the data!
- Data Maps – To display video game sales data in a fun and interactive manner. Search by type of genre and see the results!
- Multi Visualization – To display video game sales data in a fun and interactive manner. Various cool visualizations!
- Data Table – To display video game sales data, sort, search and examine!

Discussion

What has the audience learned from your work?
- The US is the biggest video games market.
- The video game sale shows an increasing trend since 1995, when computer started to be used by people all over the world, and reach the peak at 2008. Then a decreasing trend is observed till now.
- Using the radar chart, we can find that the when sort by company-platform-sale, Sony only has video games on few platform but have good performance in all the platforms. To the contrary,
What new insights or practices has your system enabled?
Our system is able to give the insights that have never been noticed by people before. because we apply various of data visualization method in the same page. This innovation let the users easily compare with multi platform, company, year, so on and so forth.
Another perspective is our system is user friendly. Because users could design the interface themselves. For example, we put the data table and dash board in the same page.This is aim at letting the users have both an overview of the data set and the details about the data. In that way. users not only know what happened, bu also know why it happened.

Future Work

• let users upload their own data file, and be able to recognize the data columns so that can provide service like a tool.
• Put more interesting visualization technologies into our application.
• Improve interactivity by using D3.js to rebuild the main layout design instead of using Rshiny control bar to realize all the interactivity.

Installation guide

including hardware configuration and software integrationn. Sample Installation Guide

User Guide

After the installation of our application, u should be able to see our layout in your default browser.

Wish you can enjoy your exploration journey in the Video Game Industry lah!

Video Game Market Overview

This section of our design is to let you have the ability to explore the data by yourself. Although we only built few graph type inside, you still can find plenty of information by leveraging our powerful control bar designed by Rshiny.

Control Bar

You can do the following things with the help of the control bar:

 1.  Choose the type of summary which will be shown in the right graph panel.

"By counts" means summary is done by counting how many games.

"By sales" means summary is done by summing up the global sales of the games.

 2.  Choose the type of graph which can let you switch the layout between line graph and pie chart.

P.S.: When "Pie Chart" and "By counts" are selected, the pie chart is replaced by its line graph because it is not available to show a pie chart here.

 3.  Leverage the Filters of the data set if interested.

For Genre only, all the 12 genres are listed. For Platform and Publisher, there are too many lines or pieces of pie in the visualization part if not using filter.

So our default settings for the right visualization tabsetpanel when Platform, Genre or Publisher is activated(in the right visualization part, not in the control bar) is what you have seen in the left control bar: only the main categories are included, no matter the filter is activated or not.

Kindly Reminder: Do remember to activate the filters you want by ticking the check boxes above the filter input windows. Otherwise the filter won't work!

 4.  Select the year range you like

By moving the year range bar, the user will can notice the movement of the industry and find very interesting stuff.

Visualization Panel

Because we design this part by leveraging R package Ployly, you can find some useful built-in functions of Plotly when hanging your mouse over the section.

The useful functions are:

• Zoom -- Pan, Zoom in, Zoom out, Reset.
• Two types to show data on hover.
• Cancel or add in the line or piece of pie you want or do not want by clicking the respective legend.

Data Table

The data table is to let users have direct feeling of the data, the games. Due to the top ranked games are very familiar to us, it is very good to show the data directly to our users who are gamers and eager to see those well-know games. And the data table is linked with the control bar, which means once the data is filtered, the data table will tell what games are in usage.

We design this part by using R package DT. Just like Plotly, DT also has some fantastic built-in functions. Those are:

• Searching
• Sorting data in ascending or descending order.
• Page view.

Main Publisher Radar Chart

This section of our design is to explore the features of different main publishers such as Sony, Nintendo and EA. you can also leverage our powerful control bar designed by Rshiny to check the area of your interest.

You can do the following things with the help of the control bar:

 0.  Select the Publisher you want to explore.

Of course, this is the first step.

 1.  Choose the type of summary which will be shown in the right graph panel.

"By counts" means summary is done by counting how many games.

"By sales" means summary is done by summing up the global sales of the games.

 2.  Choose the area of your interest: Genre? Sale Regions? Platforms?

 3.  Select the year range you like

By moving the year range bar, the user will can notice the movement of the industry and find very interesting stuff.

P.S.: The pie chart won't show up if "By counts" and "Region" are selected at the same time. The reason is the same as the exception in the Video Game Market Overview.