Now that my summer job is finally over—and with no school to look forward to now that I’ve graduated—I’m stuck in job hunt limbo. Which isn’t really that bad; much as I enjoy having money, I’ve found a lot of time to do things I’ve wanted to do for awhile now that I really have nothing better to do. Like create a deviantID, which I’ve been meaning to do for a couple years now. Or finish that Death Note AMV I got hopelessly stuck on (coming soon, hopefully). Maybe play through Kingdom Harts, finally. And work on my seemingly never-ending piece of fiction, Project Millennium.
One thing I fealt needed addressing, however, was my personal database of stuff. Yes, I have so much stuff that I took the time to catalogue it all in a database. I first started it while I was *ahem* acquiring anime, to help eliminate duplicate acquisitions. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen often enough that felt something could be done. Enter Microsoft Access, that useful application that lets you put together databases in no time. Soon I had not only my growing collection of anime cataloged, but also my video games and movies.
After awhile things got really busy (graduation, interviewing, etc.) and I didn’t really keep the thing updated, making it fairly useless. Now that I have loads of free time, however, I thought “Hey, why not go back and redo it?” So last night I started over, this time beginning with my video games. After an hour or so of data entry I now have a Video Games table that contains the title, genre, and platform data on 161 games I currently own.
While that process is horribly boring, there is some fun to be had once it has been completed. Access 2007 gave us PivotTables and PivotCharts, obscenely useful tools for organizing and presenting data stored in an Access database. I’m sure PivotTables have their place, but PivotCharts are more interesting to me. Let’s take a look at one now, shalle we?
Useless StatisticsHere we can see the number of games I own sorted by platform, and then further broken down by genre. Steam is used here as it’s own platform since it’s a fundamentally different thing than traditional PC games. Likewise, the genre listings are largely subjective and some (listing Kingdom Hearts as Adventure instead of RPG) could be disputed. From this chart we can see a number of interesting (and totally useless) bits of information:
- I own a lot of games. More than even I thought. It should be noted that this database does not contain all of my games. Duplicates (owning the same game on different platforms) were excluded, as well as some platforms that I still have but rarely play anymore (Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64).
- I own more Windows games than any other platform, which is pretty surprising. I’m not really a huge PC gamer. Part of this has to do with how games are listed, however. Command & Conquer: The First Decade is listed as the individual games it contains–twelve in all–and not as a single game. Expansion packs are also counted as individual games, which isn’t entirely accurate.
- Of the Windows games I own, nearly all of them are first-person shooters, real-time strategy games, or sim games.
- Survival Horror games make up a significant portion of my console games, accounting for half of my Gamecube games and being the second and third largest genre’s I own on Playstation 2 and Playstation One (respectively).
- Combined, I own more Playstation games than any other platform, with the widest range of genres (9 of the 14 listed).
- I own only four Gamecube games.
There’s more that could be done here. For example, each entry also has a completed option, which I can check off as I complete the games. I haven’t completed 53 of the 161 games I own, for example, most of which are on the PC. “Completed” here is a little subjective, however. Games that don’t have a traditional win scenario (sim games for example, or strictly multiplayer games like Team Fortress 2) are checked as completed.
Anyways, I was having fun with Access and thought I’d share these useless statistics with you all. Next time: useless statistics for anime!