Lesson in Analytics From Mobile Gaming — Hustle Castle
The Value Of Time Series, Personification, & Patience
Their is something oddly addictive about builder games. My.com’s castle simulator (is that really what this is?) Hustle Castle is pretty creative. Honestly, the folks at Studio Nord have created more of a compartmentalized costume party. Yes you get to build a castle… sort of. But you spend more time training, equipping, and sometimes pimping little characters.
With all the clothing, I mean armor options, it is a bit like a mobile Barbie game (or perhaps Kardashian Castle?). There is also plenty of crafting and something that we can call exploring but feels a bit thin. So why is this game addictive?
Personification
I am using this term a little loosely, so let me explain what I mean. In the analytic arena, personification is often applied to the technique of putting a personal or human face on the data. It is about creating a story of a customer or an experience. It brings the data to life.
Hustle Castle does something similar with their little dress-up castle patrons. They have names and costumes, gear and skills. They add a very human and personal touch to your castle. This is good, because otherwise it is really just a plug-and-play grid. It is the little castle dwellers that really make it something interesting.
Time Series
Mobile builder games tend to take some patience or a good number of diamonds (or gold) which in turn require a bunch of in-game purchasing. They are engineered that way. Hustle Castle isn’t horrible, otherwise I would have given up long ago. It uses a mix of in-game and advertising, but I will admitted, several weeks in — things are starting to slow down a little too much for my liking.
Analytics has its own patience challenging concept — time series. A term I am using even more loosely. Time series refers to any historic data captured in a way that allows you to analyze values over time. It is a necessity for things like A/B testing, campaign analysis, and regression (to name a few). As such, analyst spend a lot of time waiting for time series to mature, to develop, to produce value. It feels a bit like a mobile builder game, other than the preponderance of other distractions and an utter lack of in-game purchasing.
As I have noted before in both this series and others, there is a lot of commonality between gaming skills and analytic skills. Hustle Castle emphasizes two we hadn’t talk about before. Personification and time series each add a certain quality — to game play as well as analytics. In analytics, they are a necessity capable of putting some money in your pocket. In gaming, they are more likely to pull some out.
Thanks for reading!
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