Game of Thrones Casualties Visualization — My First Tableau Project
It has been over 3years since the last season of HBO’s famous TV series, Game of Thrones ended. This show definitely got a large chunk of earth’s inhabitants glued for the period of time it aired. For those of us that watched the show, one thing we all can definitely agree on is that Game of Thrones came strongly with a copious amount of killings/deaths across most of the 8 seasons.
Considering the number of causalities that were recorded in the series, I thought it would be interesting to show which of our favorite characters were master killers and what their go-to killing methods were. I knew that gathering the data would take an exceptional amount of meticulous watching time in order to document every on-screen kill/death, so I was grateful to have come across Datasaurus-Rex’s already-compiled dataset. I was able to get access to this dataset because I was taking the University of California, Davis Data Visualization with Tableau course.
About the Dataset
The dataset has 2,224 rows which is the total number of on-screen deaths, and 9 columns. It was clean and did not need any wrangling.
This dataset only includes deaths that happened on screen, it does not include battle estimates. Dead bodies shown on the screen were not recorded, the undead were not counted. Deaths caused by animals who were wielded as weapons by humans were counted.
Procedure
This is a simple dashboard with only 3 sheets. Having seen lots of beautifully-done dashboards on Twitter and inquiring on how I could make mine equally stunning, I found out that if I wanted a unique background for my dashboard, I could design it using Figma. I proceeded to download Figma to design this simple background (as it was my first time using it).
After designing the background in Figma, I imported it as a picture into Tableau Public. Prior to this, I had already imported my dataset into Tableau Public and created 3 sheets, one for each visualization.
Due to the large numbers of killers, sheet 1 produced a lot of bars that made the bar chart look too clustered. Therefore, I filtered the killers to only the top 10. The steps are;
- Click on the small dropdown arrow on “killer”
- Click on “Create”. Another list pops to the right, then click “Set”.
- Once you click set, a dialogue box pops up, input the name you would like to give your set. Click on “Top” tab and select the “By field” option.
- You can either select top or bottom from the dropdown, and enter the value you want. In my case, I selected “Top” and the value “10” because I wanted to filter out only the top 10 killers.
- Click on “OK” and you are all done!
Sheet 2 is an interactive bubble chart that shows the most used killing method. From this viz, it is evident that dragon fire (dracarys!) caused the most deaths in the TV show. Not surprising because dragon fire was mostly used where there were lots of people. Coming in second place was sword, which again, was not surprising as there were lots of episodes where soldiers wielded their swords. Remember our beloved Ned Stark was also beheaded with a sword, yea! very sad death. The bigger the bubble, the bigger the amount of kills that tool was used for.
Sheet 3 is another bar chart which shows the top 5 killers by season. The top 5 killers were filtered out using the procedure highlighted earlier. This viz shows that season 8 had the highest amount of kills/death by no other person than the mother of dragons. This is therefore inline with dragon fire being the most used kill tool. There is a tie between Arya Stark and Jon Snow for having the same number of kills in season 7. Wight (white walker) had the most kills in season 4 and Cersei Lannister had her kills earlier on in the show (season 2).
Here is the full dashboard.
The filter button at the top right corner of the dashboard has a dropdown list of the names of the top 10 killers. So clicking on any name would filter the dashboard to show the total number of kills that person had, their favorite killing methods/tools and what season they had the most kills. Here is an example of the dashboard when filtered with Arya Stark.
A link to the interactive dashboard on Tableau Public can be found here. Please do interact and share your feedback.
I hope you had fun reading as I had fun visualizing this dataset!