SVBlog – The intersection of data science, games, cycling, and stuff.
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GROGPOD: the Going Rogue Gaming Podcast
I’ve complained a lot about roguelikes recently, so it’s only fitting for me to start a podcast on one. This will be a once-every-two-week show focused on the top 100ish roguelike games to release on Steam since 2011. Why so specific? Partly because Steam has the best data for this kind of thing to collect…
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Guest Spot: Talking Edith Finch on Ultra64
Orcas Island is a special place. When I first learned there was a critically-acclaimed game that took place where I went to high school, I ran, not walked to check it out. I was able to get my final guest spot on one of Ultra64’s last episodes to cover the game and boy was it…
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Coming Soon: a Podcast About Roguelikes
If the world needs more of something: it’s videogame podcasts. I’ve been posting a lot about a specific genre of games, roguelikes, for a while now and have been doing some interesting deep dives of the data using steam’s API. What kind of games will be covered? If you’re a fan of the following games,…
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Guest Spot: Talking Cogmind on the Ultra64 Podcast
I finally tricked Steve and Woody to play one of my favorite games of all time on the Ultra64 Podcast. Cogmind is 100% a hobby-grade traditional roguelike, but an investment worth making. At least, I’ve found it to be so after 80 hours in thus far. If you’ve ever wanted a game that blends The…
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No One Knows What a Roguelike Is Anymore
2022-05-04 edit: credit where credit is due: it seems like Steam has updated some of this data, so “The Problem” section is a little bit fixed. The ideas explored in “A Linguistic Solution” are still relevant, though. Original post follows. I was super excited to see Steam’s most recent themed sale around Roguelikes. I’m a…
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Steam Data Science – User Engagement Profiles
An early question that motivated the design of my steam_data_science python repository was trying to answer “how much do I really like this game?” The idea originally started because a lot of previous analyses I’ve done always relied on just raw user playtime data to do stuff. The problem is: a lot of my data…
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Introducing the Steam_Data_Science repo!
A lot of my blog posts have been about the data science of the video game world. In an effort to consolidate my projects into one location specific to the Steam platform, I’m launching the Steam_Data_Science repo on github. The idea here is to collect all sorts of interesting functions to answer questions like: What…
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Guest Spot: Talking Halo: Combat Evolved on the Ultra64 Podcast
To celebrate Halo’s recent anniversary, I’m on another guest spot of the Ultra64 Podcast! Always a pleasure being on Steve and Woody’s show.
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2021 Top 10s
Top 10 Steam games (out of 47 played for 2021): GOTY: Hades Early Access GOTY: Cogmind DLC of the year: Crosscode – A New Home Top 3 Books (out of 7 read for 2021): Jonathan Abrams – All The Pieces Matter (BOTY) Rod Machado – Rod Machado’s Pilot Handbook Edward Tufte – Beautiful Evidence
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Halo: Data Evolved
When Halo 2 came out in 2004, it was a watershed moment in videogaming for me. The culmination of a sequel to one of my favorite games, but with online play you say??? It was just an electrifying time to be playing games at the time, and checking my game’s stats on halo.bungie.net was an…
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