Situated Visualization in Motion for Video games

Researchers

• Federica Bucchieri (Aviz)
• Lijie Yao (Aviz)
• Petra Isenberg (Aviz)

Overview

With the prevalence of video games and the growing games market, many people are used to following moving game elements on the screen. Gameplay produces rich and changing data, some of which is shown to gamers in the form of visualizations that are also often moving. These visualizations are designed to aid players succeed in the game and make important decisions about how to act in the game. Examples include health bars, navigation aids, resource inventories, or team membership. As such, visualizations play an important role in how effective a player can be but they also pose a number of interesting design challenges. Visualizations need to be read at a glance while the player is focused on a primary task such as fulfilling a game mission. They also often need to be small, match the aesthetics of the game, or be closely embedded next to game elements. In order to survey the current practice of visualizations in motion in video games, we reviewed 50 games from 17 different genres. In these games we found 160 examples of visualizations in motion that we categorize according to different dimensions. Our future research goal is to design and embed visualizations in motion in the context of games and to explore the impact of contextual factors in video games on visualizations in motion.