Electronic games are starting to incorporate in-game telemetry that collects data about player, team, and community performance on a massive scale, and as data begins to accumulate, so does the demand for effectively analyzing this data. In this paper, we use examples from both old and new games of different genres to explore the theory and design space of visualization for games. Drawing on these examples, we define a design space for this novel research topic and use it to formulate design patterns for how to best apply visualization technology to games. We then discuss the implications that this new framework will potentially have on the design and development of game and visualization technology in the future.

Despite typically receiving little emphasis in visualization research, interaction in visualization is the catalyst for the user's dialogue with the data, and, ultimately, the user’s actual understanding and insight into this data. There are many possible reasons for this skewed balance between the visual and interactive aspects of a visualization. One reason is that interaction is an intangible concept that is difficult to design, quantify, and evaluate. Unlike for visual design, there are few examples that show visualization practitioners and researchers how to best design the interaction for a new visualization. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue by collecting examples of visualizations with "best-in-class" interaction and using them to extract practical design guidelines for future designers and researchers. We call this concept fluid interaction, and we propose an operational definition in terms of the direct manipulation and embodied interaction paradigms, the psychological concept of "flow", and Norman’s gulfs of execution and evaluation.