Basic data analysis with popular videogames dataset

Cabral Juan Andrés

In this tutorial, we cover some basic commands for conducting an introductory analysis of a dataset. The goal of this tutorial is to provide me with handy snippets of code that I can use whenever I need to analyze a dataset. The dataset we will be analyzing here is about video games and was obtained from Kaggle: Popular Video Games Dataset by Matheus Fonseca Chaves.

Loading the data

import pandas as pd

# Load the data
data = pd.read_csv('C:/Users/juanc/Downloads/archive/backloggd_games.csv')

# Show the first few rows of the dataframe
data.head()

	Unnamed: 0	Title	Release_Date	Developers	Summary	Platforms	Genres	Rating	Plays	Playing	Backlogs	Wishlist	Lists	Reviews
0	0	Elden Ring	Feb 25, 2022	['FromSoftware', 'Bandai Namco Entertainment']	Elden Ring is a fantasy, action and open world...	['Windows PC', 'PlayStation 4', 'Xbox One', 'P...	['Adventure', 'RPG']	4.5	21K	4.1K	5.6K	5.5K	4.6K	3K
1	1	The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild	Mar 03, 2017	['Nintendo', 'Nintendo EPD Production Group No...	The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the...	['Wii U', 'Nintendo Switch']	['Adventure', 'Puzzle']	4.4	35K	3.1K	5.6K	3K	5.1K	3K
2	2	Hades	Dec 07, 2018	['Supergiant Games']	A rogue-lite hack and slash dungeon crawler in...	['Windows PC', 'Mac', 'PlayStation 4', 'Xbox O...	['Adventure', 'Brawler', 'Indie', 'RPG']	4.3	25K	3.5K	7.3K	4K	3.2K	2.1K
3	3	Hollow Knight	Feb 24, 2017	['Team Cherry']	A 2D metroidvania with an emphasis on close co...	['Windows PC', 'Mac', 'Linux', 'Nintendo Switch']	['Adventure', 'Indie', 'Platform']	4.4	25K	2.7K	9.6K	2.6K	3.4K	2.1K
4	4	Undertale	Sep 15, 2015	['tobyfox', '8-4']	A small child falls into the Underground, wher...	['Windows PC', 'Mac', 'Linux', 'PlayStation 4'...	['Adventure', 'Indie', 'RPG', 'Turn Based Stra...	4.2	32K	728	5.7K	2.1K	3.9K	2.5K

Basic description of the data

# Shape of the dataset
print("Shape of the dataset:", data.shape)

Shape of the dataset: (60000, 14)

The dataset contains 60,000 rows and 14 columns.

# Data types of each column
print("Data types of each column:")
print(data.dtypes)

# Basic statistics
data.describe(include='all')

Data types of each column:
Unnamed: 0        int64
Title            object
Release_Date     object
Developers       object
Summary          object
Platforms        object
Genres           object
Rating          float64
Plays            object
Playing          object
Backlogs         object
Wishlist         object
Lists            object
Reviews          object
dtype: object

	Unnamed: 0	Title	Release_Date	Developers	Summary	Platforms	Genres	Rating	Plays	Playing	Backlogs	Wishlist	Lists	Reviews
count	60000.000000	60000	60000	60000	55046	60000	60000	25405.000000	60000	60000	60000	60000	60000	60000
unique	NaN	40985	8956	18356	38411	3169	1751	NaN	1053	453	923	800	810	606
top	NaN	Date A Live Twin Edition: Rio Reincarnation	TBD	[]	Date A Live Twin Edition: Rio Reincarnation is...	['Windows PC']	[]	NaN	0	0	0	0	0	0
freq	NaN	24	8019	18091	24	13757	6741	NaN	13596	45518	19786	24847	17942	36890
mean	29999.500000	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	3.033171	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN
std	17320.652413	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	0.735573	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN
min	0.000000	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	0.300000	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN
25%	14999.750000	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	2.600000	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN
50%	29999.500000	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	3.100000	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN
75%	44999.250000	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	3.500000	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN
max	59999.000000	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	5.000000	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN	NaN

The game "Date A Live Twin Edition: Rio Reincarnation" appears most frequently in the dataset.\ There are 8,956 unique release dates and 'TBD' (To Be Determined) is the most common value.\ There are 18,356 unique developers and an empty list appears most frequently.\ 'Windows PC' is the most common platform the games are available on.\ There are 1,751 unique genres and an empty list appears most frequently. \ The average game rating is approximately 3.03 with a standard deviation of about 0.74. Ratings range from 0.3 to 5.

Data cleaning

# Remove the 'Unnamed: 0' column
data = data.drop(['Unnamed: 0'], axis=1)

# Convert 'Release_Date' to datetime
data['Release_Date'] = pd.to_datetime(data['Release_Date'], errors='coerce')


# Convert 'Plays', 'Playing', 'Backlogs', 'Wishlist', 'Lists', 'Reviews' to integers
# We first need to clean the 'K' suffix and convert the data to numeric type
def clean_number(number_str):
    if 'K' in number_str:
        return float(number_str.replace('K', '')) * 1000
    else:
        return float(number_str)

for column in ['Plays', 'Playing', 'Backlogs', 'Wishlist', 'Lists', 'Reviews']:
    data[column] = data[column].apply(clean_number)

# Check the cleaned data
data.head()

	Title	Release_Date	Developers	Summary	Platforms	Genres	Rating	Plays	Playing	Backlogs	Wishlist	Lists	Reviews
0	Elden Ring	2022-02-25	['FromSoftware', 'Bandai Namco Entertainment']	Elden Ring is a fantasy, action and open world...	['Windows PC', 'PlayStation 4', 'Xbox One', 'P...	['Adventure', 'RPG']	4.5	21000.0	4100.0	5600.0	5500.0	4600.0	3000.0
1	The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild	2017-03-03	['Nintendo', 'Nintendo EPD Production Group No...	The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the...	['Wii U', 'Nintendo Switch']	['Adventure', 'Puzzle']	4.4	35000.0	3100.0	5600.0	3000.0	5100.0	3000.0
2	Hades	2018-12-07	['Supergiant Games']	A rogue-lite hack and slash dungeon crawler in...	['Windows PC', 'Mac', 'PlayStation 4', 'Xbox O...	['Adventure', 'Brawler', 'Indie', 'RPG']	4.3	25000.0	3500.0	7300.0	4000.0	3200.0	2100.0
3	Hollow Knight	2017-02-24	['Team Cherry']	A 2D metroidvania with an emphasis on close co...	['Windows PC', 'Mac', 'Linux', 'Nintendo Switch']	['Adventure', 'Indie', 'Platform']	4.4	25000.0	2700.0	9600.0	2600.0	3400.0	2100.0
4	Undertale	2015-09-15	['tobyfox', '8-4']	A small child falls into the Underground, wher...	['Windows PC', 'Mac', 'Linux', 'PlayStation 4'...	['Adventure', 'Indie', 'RPG', 'Turn Based Stra...	4.2	32000.0	728.0	5700.0	2100.0	3900.0	2500.0

The unnecessary 'Unnamed: 0' column has been removed.\ The 'Release_Date' column has been converted to datetime format.\ The 'Plays', 'Playing', 'Backlogs', 'Wishlist', 'Lists', 'Reviews' columns have been converted from string to float. Strings with a 'K' suffix have been converted to their numerical equivalents (e.g., '21K' to 21000).

Basic analysis

# Top 10 games with the highest ratings
top_rated_games = data.sort_values('Rating', ascending=False).head(10)
top_rated_games[['Title', 'Rating']]

	Title	Rating
9549	700,000 Games	5.0
46118	Etherlords	5.0
46046	Etherlords	5.0
3928	Ys X: Nordics	5.0
4621	Jack Jeanne	5.0
25984	Animals Fight	5.0
10434	Aventura Copilului Albastru si Urat	5.0
19901	Goalkeeper Training VR	5.0
9656	700,000 Games	5.0
46153	Etherlords	5.0

Note that some games appear more than once in the top 10 list. This is because they might be released on different platforms or have different versions.

# Top 10 games with the highest number of plays
most_played_games = data.sort_values('Plays', ascending=False).head(10)
most_played_games[['Title', 'Plays']]

	Title	Plays
5	Minecraft	38000.0
1	The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild	35000.0
23	Grand Theft Auto V	35000.0
13	Portal 2	34000.0
4	Undertale	32000.0
22	Portal	32000.0
35	Super Smash Bros. Ultimate	29000.0
11	Among Us	29000.0
21	Super Mario Odyssey	29000.0
56	The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim	26000.0

These are some of the most popular games based on the number of plays.

Next, let's look at the most popular genres. For this, we need to first clean the 'Genres' column as it contains lists represented as strings. We will then count the occurrence of each genre.

import ast

# Clean the 'Genres' column
data['Genres'] = data['Genres'].apply(ast.literal_eval)

# Count the occurrence of each genre
genre_counts = data['Genres'].explode().value_counts()

# Top 10 most popular genres
genre_counts.head(10)

Adventure    19368
Indie        16816
RPG           9234
Simulator     8050
Strategy      7766
Shooter       7258
Puzzle        6935
Platform      6126
Arcade        5603
Sport         3912
Name: Genres, dtype: int64

Adventure and Indie are the most prevalent genres in the dataset, followed by RPG and Simulator.

Some graphics

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

# Set the style of the plots
sns.set(style="whitegrid")

# Plot 1: Distribution of game ratings
plt.figure(figsize=(10, 6))
sns.histplot(data['Rating'], kde=False, bins=20)
plt.title('Distribution of Game Ratings')
plt.xlabel('Rating')
plt.ylabel('Frequency')
plt.show()

# Plot 2: Top 10 most popular genres
plt.figure(figsize=(10, 6))
sns.barplot(x=genre_counts.head(10), y=genre_counts.head(10).index)
plt.title('Top 10 Most Popular Genres')
plt.xlabel('Number of Games')
plt.ylabel('Genre')
plt.show()

Distribution of Game Ratings: This histogram shows the distribution of game ratings. Each bar represents the frequency of games that fall within a particular rating range. For example, the highest bar represents the rating range with the most games. From the graph, it appears that the ratings are roughly normally distributed around 3, with fewer games receiving very low or very high ratings.

Top 10 Most Popular Genres: This bar chart shows the 10 most popular genres, ranked by the number of games in each genre. The length of each bar represents the number of games in the genre. Adventure and Indie are the most popular genres, followed by RPG (Role-Playing Game) and Simulator.

# Plot 3: Number of games released each year
data['Release_Year'] = data['Release_Date'].dt.year
games_per_year = data['Release_Year'].value_counts().sort_index()
games_per_year = games_per_year[games_per_year.index <= 2021]

plt.figure(figsize=(10, 6))
plt.plot(games_per_year.index, games_per_year.values, marker='o')
plt.xlabel('Year')
plt.ylabel('Number of Games Released')
plt.title('Number of Games Released Each Year')
plt.show()

This line graph shows the number of games released each year. The x-axis represents the year, and the y-axis represents the number of games released that year. Each point on the line represents a specific year. From this graph, we can see the trend of the number of games released over time.