Bar Chart Ball, a Data Game

We describe Bar Chart Ball, a game where players indirectly control a ball by modifying a bar chart that the ball rests on. The bar chart displays real-world demographic data about the UK, and the player modifies the chart by selecting which aspect of the data to focus on. By making data selection a core game mechanic, in fact the only game mechanic, we advance a novel and simple way of building game content from data, and of making data visualisation playable. 1. DATA GAMES Data games are games where gameplay and/or game content is based on real-world data external to the game, and where gameplay supports the exploration of and learning from this data [2]. Unlike most games, where real-world data is at most source material for human designers, data games build on the automatic or semi-automatic processing of publicly available data for automatically transforming this data into game content. Unlike most serious games, data games are not intended to teach a particular curriculum or instil a particular opinion, instead they aim to empower players by allowing them to freely explore the data through play, and to playfully create their own understanding. The idea of data games draws heavily on the increasing amount of open data and in particular linked data available due to the efforts of governments, NGOs and other organisations [3], and also on recent developments in procedural content generation [4]. As yet, there are few games that are unequivocally sit within this definition. We have previously described a content generator for the classic board game Monopoly, where players define their own concept of prosperity and a new board is automatically generated that reflects the expressed prosperity concept in the selection and valuation of streets [1]. The boards build on data collected online from various sources, including the UK government and DBPedia, and are generated using an evolutionary algorithm. In this short paper, http://data-games.org/ we describe a new data game, Bar Chart Ball, that gamifies the same dataset in a very different way.