Metrico is a puzzle action game for PlayStation Vita that centers around charts and graphs. The creators call them infographics, but whatever.
The idea has been in our heads for a few years, and was born out of noticing how beautiful infographics can look as an art form. It was reinforced by seeing that infographics have become increasingly important in contemporary pop-culture. While they haven’t made their way to videogames yet, we think it’s a place where they can work exceptionally well. This is not just because of their pretty aesthetics as much as it is about actively changing data and how that can be visualized.
The teaser above shows a guy running on and jumping over bar and line charts, and the last sentence of the paragraph seems to suggest that these things will be based on actual data. I kind of doubt it though.
How about a SimCity-like game that uses real-time crime, traffic, and government data? Now that’d be something. They already kind of do that for sports games with injuries and starting lineups. [Thanks, Raphael]
Hey, you posted it! :)
I bet the overlap between the data scientist community and the gamer community is probably substantial and underserved….
Your comment on the game gave me an idea: If you think in terms of the way that cars are now starting to use networked data to identify optimised traffic routes, and the fact that so many people have smart devices… there should be a potential to do a Minority Report kind of predictive analysis of data to determine where some kind of disturbance is going to take place ahead of a given event…. Create a just in time news channel, that processes historic data together with current data, pushes it to a citizen paparazzi crew, who in turn, use their iPhones to video a fight, traffic accident, etc. They upload to the channel, which broadcasts it in near real time…. and get paid.