”It reminded me of you, Dad,” my son told me, “because you try playing video games but have difficulties understanding them…even the basic aspects of them. And you’re a total button-masher.”

That is all true.

I took something a little different from the video. The creator, Razbuten, undertook a slightly-risky marital experiment by asked his wife to try out nine different video games, observing her trials and tribulations like an anthropologist. From this exercise, Razbuten explored “the language of video games, and just how much a person’s level of video game literacy affects their experience with any given title.”

The lessons for game developers apply equally to analytics translators and anyone trying to reach a data pre-literate audience. Let me take you on a rundown of the many “small barriers to entry for new players”:

1. Discovering the basics

Video games — and data presentation — have their own unique vocabulary that helps quickly convey common concepts. In games, some of these instructions are never explained in-game; you’d have to read the manual (nobody reads the manual).

“I noticed that there were a vast amount of seemingly basic functions and mechanics that she either didn’t fully grasp or know existed.”

With so much information presented at once, explanations can be lost to information-overload or skipped past accidentally. When you are starting from ground zero, people do better if there is less to remember and the information is doled out more slowly.

A few suggestions for data communicators:

“Give a memorable use of a mechanic” to make it easier to remember.

In-experience instructions sometimes assume basic skills and understanding. Don’t assume.

Most people learn best from other people. Encourage collaboration and social aspects to build communal knowledge.

2. "Where the F*#@k am I going?"

Some games make it easy to know where you are headed. ‘2D platformers’ — the games where you jumping between platforms and navigate through levels — tend to move to the right. It is a convention that is easy to learn. Games that explore a 3D world aren’t as kind to novice gamers. Where you should go next requires picking up on cues that might be well-understood by experts, but invisible to newbies. Poor Razbuten’s wife…

“Due to her not moving the camera around a ton, she didn’t always get a great sense of her surroundings, so she struggled with figuring out where she was and where to go.”

Nor did she notice important heads-up display features (e.g. compass, health bars, waypoints) due to information overload.

When it comes to data communication, we’ve said it a thousand times: Dashboards seldom provide guidance on where to start and how the user should navigate the information. That’s why we designed Juicebox to flow down the page (“scrollytelling” or notebook-style).

3. Too much information

Players are hit with a lot of information when they play games. If not comfortable with the basics, it can be too much.

Of course this is equally true when it comes to dashboards and data visualizations. We’ve all experienced the complex charts with multiple variables and screens full of metrics. To quote the play, Hamilton:

This financial plan is an outrageous demand And it's too many damn pages for any man to understand

For new gamers or data audiences, less is more. Be a data gourmet, not a data gourmand.

4. Learning the wrong lessons

Razbuten was fascinated by how his wife could misinterpret the cues she was getting to learn the wrong lessons. In the flurry of information, she assumed a causal game mechanic in a specific action-reaction, when it was a correlation.

Put another way, new players may have difficulty generalizing instructions if they are presented the instructions in a very specific situation. They don’t see the larger lesson and how it can be applied in many situations.

This suggests a need to explain the same lesson in multiple ways in multiple scenarios to ensure the new player truly gets the larger lesson.

5. Thinking Games would be Cooler

“When most people talk about what any video game is like, there is often a greater focus on the general actions players can do rather than the limitations that make it possible for the game to function.”

There can be a gap between expectations and the necessary reality to make a game work.

New players can get caught in the trap of “trying to apply a real-world logic,” and get frustrated when the game doesn’t respond as they would expect in the real-world. However, games (and data communication tools) simply can’t offer unlimited flexibility…

“…limitation exist in games because there are only so many potential inputs a title can have, meaning there are a finite number of ways a player can interact with things. Also, if developers tried to program in every possible way a player might think about interacting with something, games would just never come out.”

For data presentation, this is a powerful reminder to set expectations. What questions can we answer with this dashboard? What does it not cover?

Nevertheless, we’ve long believed that it is important to give your user some agency in their journey through the data. If they have the freedom to express what is important to them in the process, they will be more willing to go along for the ride.

6. The Payoff

“I think this tradeoff of dealing with frustration so that the excitement of beating something is all that much sweeter, is one that people who play a lot of games not only understand, but look for.”

The path to satisfaction comes through dedication and overcoming challenges. You don’t enjoy the victory without any struggle.

Analytics professionals know this. They know that there is a struggle with data that starts early, long before it is visualized on a screen. Gathering, cleaning, understanding, analyzing, designing — the path to insights can be long. It can also be rewarding. Novice data workers don’t yet know all the bumps in the road.