National Video Games Day was Thursday 7th July, 2020. A day where people in
the gaming community can reflect on what video games mean to them. For me,
video games are a way of staying in touch with friends I no longer live close
to and provides an escape from the everyday stresses of the world.
It's clear that I'm not the only one, with #ThanksToVideoGames making waves
on Twitter, people from all over the world shared their own reasons to be
grateful for having video games in their lives. My curiosity got the
better of me; I wanted to find out more about why people were grateful for
video games and I wanted to show people that (shockingly) gamers can also be
very sincere online.
I created this visualisation of the most common words that appeared in
tweets with #ThanksToVideoGames to show the different themes coming through
in discussions on Twitter. Make sure you hit the full screen icon to show
the full picture; you can find also find this Viz on my Tableau Public Profile.
But as you can see, video games are not only about socialising with friends. For many, video games have played a significant role in some of the most important periods in their lives. For some, a love of video games has translated into a dream career; for others, they met the love of their lives through gaming; video games can be an important release or escape from stresses of reality; and, for some, video games have been a lifeline, helping them through difficult times and struggles in coming to terms with who they are.
You
can explore the individual words and how often they occurred for each
topic in the handy graphic below.
It wasn't all too surprising to me that themes like connecting with others or escaping to a different world were common in these tweets. It was, however, perhaps a surprise that there were very few references to themes like competition and violence - themes that are very common in mass media portrayals of gamers as hyper-competitive nerds that spend their days locked away shooting zombies or aliens in ultra-violent shooter games.
My own
experience with video games is that this only captures a very small
part of the range of video games out there, and the reasons for
playing them. For many, shooter games are not about the violence at
all, and they are often played just because it's what their friends
are all playing, and that opportunity to connect with their friends is
what really draws them to these games in the first place.
You can see from the treemap on the left that topics such as connecting with others, positivity, and learning appeared in tweets most frequently. Connecting with others was by far the most common topic, and made up 3 of the top 4 words used across all tweets: "friends", "meet" and "people", as you can see on the right of the Viz.
The COVID-19 pandemic will have certainly highlighted the importance of video games as a means of staying connected virtually, while our ability to physically connect has been severely reduced across the globe.
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| Topics that were associated with the highest frequency of unique words included connecting with others, positivity, while themes of time, learning and escapism were also frequent. |
But as you can see, video games are not only about socialising with friends. For many, video games have played a significant role in some of the most important periods in their lives. For some, a love of video games has translated into a dream career; for others, they met the love of their lives through gaming; video games can be an important release or escape from stresses of reality; and, for some, video games have been a lifeline, helping them through difficult times and struggles in coming to terms with who they are.
It wasn't all too surprising to me that themes like connecting with others or escaping to a different world were common in these tweets. It was, however, perhaps a surprise that there were very few references to themes like competition and violence - themes that are very common in mass media portrayals of gamers as hyper-competitive nerds that spend their days locked away shooting zombies or aliens in ultra-violent shooter games.
My approach to data collection and analysis
To get to the above visualisations, I had to first collect and then
analyse the relevant data from Twitter and then produce the visualisations
themselves. To collect the data, I used the
Public Twitter API
and along with Tweepy
to scrape the data from Twitter. I adapted these code snippets from
Vicky Qian and
TowardsDataScience as a starting point. I first collected all tweets containing
#ThanksToVideoGames and posted on 7th July 2020, which gave me
3,075 unique tweets. The public Twitter API aims for relevance
rather than completeness, which means that these 3,075 tweets are not a
complete list of all tweets on this topic, but a selection of what Twitter
thinks are the most relevant. I passed the tweet text through a script to
create a dictionary of every unique word used and was returned with the
following:
Not that informative, right?
If this were a much larger data set, I would have needed to use some
natural language processing to get to a meaningful set of words and then
assign them to different themes or topics. Thankfully, as this data set is
not too onerous, I was able to use a simple, manual process in
Excel. From the original Twitter scrape, I identified 9,471 unique words.
I then selected just those words that occurred on at least 10 different
occasions, which got me down to just 209 words (most of the words that
occurred less often were either UTF codes for emojis, typos or
usernames). I then manually removed connecting words like "and" or "that"
and combined highly similar words, e.g "friend" and "friends" to get me to
a highly manageable set of 143 words.
From there, I used Tableau to create the initial Viz. The Tableau Public
community is fantastic and a great source for inspiration, whether you
plan on using Tableau or not. Finally, the interactive bar graph embedded
in this blog post was created using the amazingly flexible D3 library in
Observable, you can see the full code
here.
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