Okay, so I chose to use a scatter plot on the game dataset to see if there is a relationship between higher game prices and their respective review scores. My original hypothesis and anticipation were that higher-priced games would get higher review scores because the higher-priced games are often triple-A titles and are made by the far bigger developing studios with deeper pockets. But, to my surprise, the data is quite contrary to my belief. The data shows that the higher-priced games do not get many reviews and the ones that do have at least 70 in score and above. This would suggest that higher-priced games are often purchased with the players doing some sort of homework beforehand to see if they liked them or not, just from reviews or trailers. These buyers may be more cautious in their purchasing decisions compared to games in, let’s say, under $30s, which is the vast majority of the games on this chart. Nevertheless, we still noticed some trends that suggest that higher-priced games are often and probably more quality, as shown in the graph, between $20 and $30 games, as there are a lot fewer review scores under the 50s, whereas $10 to $20 games has the most negative reviews. However, games cheaper than $ 10 also reflect a very positive review score of more than 58, which also suggests the contrary, but, given the samples in the dataset, there are still going to be some limitations to the final accuracy.

The next analysis I performed was more interesting because I wanted to see if people’s likings changed between 2004 and 2008. I wanted to do this analysis because I kind of felt the change over those years, especially when it comes to RTS (real-time strategy) games like the Red Alert series, StarCraft, and other similar games. And this time, not to my surprise, strategy games took a brief growth and then quickly plummeted. I don’t know about StarCraft, but from my experiences with the Red Alert series, it really kind of took off in 2001 and 2002. Sadly, we don’t have the data for that year. But, we can see how it grew in 2004 to 2005 and 2006, then 2007, but suddenly, there was a noticeable decrease in 2008. During those years, I know that the studio behind the Red Alert series, Westwood Studios, was acquired by Electronic Arts, and after that acquisition, EA left it hanging and never actually released any new sequel until, of course, 2008. They completely overhauled the game to the degree that older players don’t even recognize it anymore, and that series, despite its original hope to revitalize the RTS series, quickly died. And after that, EA completely gave up on this IP. So, as you can see, this data kind of corroborates the rise and fall of this game series, game studio, and, of course, EA’s change of business philosophy. Now, action games never actually took a hit, and we would have to credit it to Valve for its Counter-Strike franchise that started off as a mod for Half-Life. This chart shows that action games or shooter games, in general, took a huge leap forward and continue to dominate the gaming world. Of course, I would want to see a follow-up for this data set to really look at the details from 2008 on because even more stories took place after 2008. The most notable one is the black horse that broke out of nowhere from Riot Games, that is, League of Legends in 2009, and quickly catapulted to the top of the chart.

Now, for the final visualization on Tableau, I chose the dataset for the world countries. In this dataset, I wanted to see if there is a correlation between a country’s wealth measured in GDP per capita versus its relative literacy rate. One would assume, including me, that the higher the literacy rate, the wealthier the countries, right? That’s what I kind of hypothesized until I looked at this graph showing the various degrees of literacy rate for a few countries, filtering the poorest and the richest in GDP per capita, the outliers of this data set. This would leave us with only a handful of countries to choose from, which still includes most of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and South Africa. So basically, what this shows is that, yes, education matters, as seen in Japan, an island nation without much of the natural resources in the country but still manages to be relatively rich among its European counterparts. The problem with Japan, though, is that GDP per capita is not really a good measure of the overall quality of living in Japan, especially in places like Tokyo, where real estate prices are still really high, even after the real estate bubble bust that happened some 20 years ago. Japan also has a demographic issue where the working population is getting old, and the birth rate is low, which is a looming threat to its GDP per capita if not properly dealt with in the next couple of decades. Now, Saudi Arabia and Oman are two of the more interesting countries in this visualization. It shows about a 75 percent literacy rate, probably mostly among men, knowing that Saudi Arabia follows a version of the teaching in the Quran that is more originalist, which does not really grant equal rights to education to some demographics of people. However, they are still well above a lot of European countries in terms of GDP per capita. This is also true for South Africa, where the literacy rate is 86% but is nowhere near as rich as Saudi Arabia. So I guess from this visualization, we can tell that Japan is a good example of self-made wealth but faces challenges in sustaining it for long-term growth, thereby needing good policymakers and a democratic society, whereas Saudi Arabia is practically sitting on resources, a naturally given wealth, thus saw democratic society where good policymaking really does not matter, including improving literacy rates for certain groups of people. Also, it is worth noting that using GDP per capita is not a good metric for evaluating wealth in a country, especially for places like Saudi Arabia, where the wealth is heavily centralized among the Saudi royal family members and particular ethnic groups in the case of South Africa.