The Variable Tree

In this post, I'll describe how to go about visualising and interpreting gamer achievement data using R, the open source tool for statistical computing . Specifically, I'll show how you can create gamer achievement profiles based on publicly available achievement records from the  Steam community API . The visualisations and data interpretation will hopefully be of interest to a general audience, but for the more technically inclined reader I've included the steps required to create the visualisations. If you're mainly interested in the analysis and interpretation, you might want to skip ahead to the Achievement Rate Distributions  section. If you're not a coder, don't be put off - R really is straight forward. The following histogram, for example, can be created from a data set using just two lines of code: This histogram shows global achievement rates (in percentage points) for all Steam achievements - more on this below. Achievement Data So wh