The Web-based Flash game Canabalt, whose scores have been analyzed by R before, is now available as an iOS App. Because the app is configured to work on three different platforms: the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch; and because players are invited to tweet their best scores at the end of the game, like this:
the Twitter stream again becomes a great data source to analyze the distribution of Canabalt high scores, and now also to compare performance on the various platforms, and even to analyze individual death types.
R user Neil Kodner has done just that, by writing Python code to scrape data from such tweets stored in a MongoDB instance, and then using the plyr package in R to aggregate the data to create some interesting visualizations of the scores, such as this one by platform:
Surprisingly the iPhone, despite its smaller screen, is the platform upon which the higher scores tend to be reported. (It's also the most-played platform, which surely skews the results somewhat -- experts on extreme value theory are welcome to chime in!) The deeper analysis by type of death is also interesting: my own demise in my high-score game "somehow hitting the edge of a crane" is one of the rarer ones. Check out the full analysis and code in Neil's blog post linked below.
neilkodner.com: Visualizations of Canabalt scores scraped from Twitter
Not a statistics expert, but perhaps iPhone is not most played, but most frequently tweeted? I play Canabault on my iPad, but I've never tweeted a score. For one main reason: I'd have to be in wifi range to do so, and I usually play Canabault when I can't get on the web.
Posted by: David Mitchell | February 23, 2011 at 20:33
the ipad has the highest score (c'mon, 40000? BS). it looks like the iphone has by far more players, which might make the slight lead over even the ipod touch negligible.
Posted by: quint | March 09, 2011 at 09:59