Raph’s Website » VisitorVille: game tech applied to web stats

VisitorVille: game tech applied to web stats

January 26th, 2007 (Visited 2130 times) Tags:

I expect we’ll see more and more of this sort fo thing over time: uses of game technology to help visualize complex data sets. After all, games are models of complex systems. So it stands to reason that some of the techniques that have been developed for conveying complex information will work well in other domains.

Enter VisitorVille, which can only be described as converting your real time web stats into a Sims-like display, with each visitor shown as a little person arriving by bus (search engine) or on their own, and entering buildings (pages) that develop and light up depending on traffic. You can even pull up a passport (unique visitor history) for each little guy you see on the screen. It’s available in 2d or 3d versions, even.

Alas, for a site my size, it looks like it would cost maybe $90 a month. I have a firm rule that the website has to pay for itself (if only in Amazon gift certificates) and I’m not willing to spend that much on stats. Which is a pity, given how interesting the tool looks.

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Bloginati » Feeds by Site wrote on January 27th, 2007 at 11:25 am:

[...] VisitorVille: game tech applied to web stats [...]

Web Analytics, Gaming Technology, and the LMOS at e-Literate wrote on January 31st, 2007 at 5:40 pm:

[...] is, until Raph Koster’s post put me onto VisitorVille–”Web Stats in Video Game [...]

Ian Bogost said on January 26th, 2007 at 3:33 pm:

I wrote an early review of VisitorVille and they gave me a free account for a while. It was back when they only had the 2D version, but still very cool. What it showed me was all the things I can never see from summary webstats, namely how people actually used the website — not just where they came from and in what numbers. Aside from the zen of just sitting and watching your web traffic, it’s really interesting to get a sense of the gaps between visits, generally how people meander around.