Witcher 3 is great but it’s no game

 

A couple of weeks ago, sometime mid February 2016, I went to the dinning room where my wife and daughter were and announced “I finished it.” I remember it well, my eyes were red, I had a knot on my throat and I was feeling quite emotional. My wife quickly turned it to a quick joke “Yey! Daddy’s back!”

In case you finished or know what is the good ending of Witcher 3, that’s what I got. If you know all this and have a young daughter, you know how I was feeling, give or take some emotion. Want to know more? 

So I bought a new (virtual) car… or why Real Racing 3 is so awesome.

Today’s post was going to be different. Initially it was going to be about rednecks. Then (and because I’m severely delayed with blog posts) I decide to write about Witcher 3, which I will by the way.

But then something awesome happened. And that something was an awesome Shelby ’66 Cobra 427. The one in the photo. So I bought a new (virtual) car… what’s the fuss about it? 

Beautiful Visualisations: Traffic in Lisbon

I google “traffic lisbon” almost every week day. Top result is a visual snippet of Google Maps with a traffic overlay. Often enough for me to decide if I should go home or stay for a bit more to avoid heavy traffic.

I don’t know if I google something slightly different or if for some random chance I happened to look to the following lines but whatever it was it opened a page with the following visualisation.

This is a beautiful visualisation, one perfect example of data story telling. I surfed the site a bit to learn more about the author Pedro Miguel Cruz and found that data visualisation is his area of research.

I have to say that whatever he is doing, he is doing it right! I won’t take more of your time today. Instead of the 5 minutes reading, take it to enjoy some of his visualisations. Here’s the link to his work!

http://pmcruz.com/work

Jamie Madigan and the Psychology of Video Games

I need sometime to prepare some goodies for the blog so for the next couple of months I’ll be writing about topics and people that orbit around games and analytics. Don’t worry I’ll return to the techy part later but what I’ve planned takes a bit of work.

In the meantime I want to start with a very special podcast and its creator.