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The attraction for the tech industry, especially gaming, has grown exponentially from the 1980s and still goes on. In the early days, we used to walk to the nearest newsstands and buy the latest issue of our favourite magazine; nowadays gamers visit Reddit and other forums on a daily basis, discussing about the most powerful armor of the game they are currently playing or asking how to build the perfect spaceship. Whether it's purposely done or made just out of pure passion, players meet data every time they press start.
A timeless masterpiece
Nowadays, if we think of the role-playing concept in a specific way, that is due to the indelible imprint left by Dungeons & Dragons. Whether you are a gamer, tabletop game lover, fantasy reader, you have certainly had to deal with the precursor of the RPG genre. Born in 1974 from Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, D&D is the quintessential role-playing game. Over the years, millions of players have come together at least once to experience the thrill of rolling a D20. D&D campaigns (adventures) take place over a flexible time frame: a few days, weeks or even months. Nonetheless, there are those who play the same campaign for 40 years.
The timeless success of the project has allowed D&D to expand into uncharted territories: from board game to video game, from book to digital tabletop game. Plenty of books, video games and communities have been taken inspiration from Gygax and Arneson's game; last but not least, Stranger Things. The TV series' huge success is partly due to Dungeons & Dragons. The young leading actors usually get together for D&D sessions; the enemies encountered over the seasons are always nicknamed like D&D’s villains: Vecna ??is a clear example.
Original D&D's Vecna (left) and Stranger Things adaptation (right)
Also, an animated series inspired by D&D has recently been released, 'The Legend of Vox Machina'. In short, D&D's ability to evolve and adapt has allowed its brand to easily grow towards multiple media, making it the de facto most popular RPG.
D&D: Dungeons & Data Science
At the heart of RPG board games, data is fundamental. To be able to play you just need a sheet, the character sheet. The character sheet is made up of one or more tables with various characteristics (strength, life points, maluses, bonuses, etc.). Almost 50 years since D&D release, it's no wonder that using tools like Excel and relational databases have come in handy for gamers. Before the birth of services like Roll20, the most intuitive way to create digital character sheets was a spreadsheet.
Paper character sheet (B&W) and character spreadsheet (Color)
As with most popular RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons is also being studied for data analysis and data science projects. There are users who use Python and its data visualization libraries to extract statistical data; still others rely on R language to be able to calculate variables and do some data exploration. Boxplot, scatterplot and matrix chart are just some of the graphs useful to generate important insights for our research.
A programmer – a GitHub user – carried out an in-depth research to advise game masters on how to manage the combat mechanics within a campaign and make the battle system more effective and consistent within the game narrative. And then there are those who even use Dungeons & Dragons as their college thesis subject! The relationship between data and video games is flourishing and D&D lives as the perfect example.
Gaming for everyone
The gaming experience has been able to adapt to the needs of the market and user requests over the years. Whether it's mobile, online or console gaming, the video game market is constantly growing and it is estimated that it could reach a market value of around $240 billion in 2026. Furthermore:
- People between 18 and 34 years represent 38% of global players.
- About 14.1 billion mobile games were downloaded in Q1 2021.
- Approximately there are 3 billion gamers in the world.
Furthermore, the rise of the gaming industry increases not only the demand for game developers but also data specialists'.
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Play-to-Learn with Data is an in-depth series about the surprising relationship between the world of data and video games. Below a comprehensive list of the cases we have been talking about:
Sources:
https://dnd.wizards.com/what-is-dnd/get-started
https://towardsdatascience.com/dnd-exploratory-analysis-using-r-d13757b09768
https://peritract.github.io/2020/05/14/dungeons-and-data/
https://github.com/cyberscribe/d20datascience
https://time.com/6182257/stranger-things-season-4-dungeons-and-dragons/