The Variable Tree

In a recent post I introduced the Steam Community API , and showed how to retrieve gamer data and perform a few simple but fun analyses. While writing the posting, I came across several problems associated with the data that's returned. If you're thinking about using Steam Community data, it's worth bearing these anomalies in mind because of the impact they'll have on downstream processing and further analysis. Frustratingly, the quality of the data available through the Steam Community API is quite variable - in particular there are many discrepancies between global achievement data compared to achievement data for individual players. I also came across several global achievement rates that were clearly invalid, and in some cases found that global achievement records for games were totally missing. The net result: it's hard to trust that the data that's returned. It is still possible to analyze returned data, but you're going to need strong ...

Introduction The Steam community API is a web service that provides public access to information about Steam users, their games, achievements, and other related information. In this blog posting I'll describe some of the interesting data you can access, as well as how to model, retrieve, and process that data. I'll also show you how to generate a few fun, simple rankings and statistics for a group of steam gamers.   This is primarily a technical article, but it concludes with the results of a simple analysis performed over a small number of friends and aquaintances on Steam, which may be of interest to the non-technically inclined. The examples shown here can be reproduced using the sample code found in this GitHub repository. It's a work in progress, but hopefully provides enough insight so you can either repeat the results or build your own equivalent. Accessing the API The first thing to know is that Steam community data is accessed using a RESTful web serv...