From Data Humanism to Metaphorical Visualization–An Educational Game Case Study

When attempting to understand a phenomenon or learn new concepts, we often use data to create models of reality, but “the map is not the territory”. We treat these imperfect abstractions as the reality itself, we design standardized dashboards to account for the multidimensional interdependencies of systems, each already complex in its own right. In doing so we fail to acknowledge the importance of emotion in learning and memory. One of the biggest challenges for digitally-mediated learning environments, whether they are serious games or online teaching platforms, is providing feedback to learners. This feedback is often constituted by scores, percentages or quantities in general and it is represented with traditional visualization techniques such as graphs, bar charts or scatter plots. This paper attempts to subvert this approach: it aims at suggesting an alternative framework for visualizing behavioral player data that can provide learners of educational games with timely feedback. This feedback should leverage emotional as well as rational appraisal of information in order to maximize the learning potential. The intended goal is to produce a generalizable framework for feedback to learners; the resulting framework will need to be validated in terms of both rational and emotional impact on the community of learners. This approach, enabled by advances both in learning science and data visualization, has the potential to innovate the emerging landscape of online learning platforms; this field is in fact burgeoning due to the ongoing pandemic and even after the emergency recedes, distance education is expected to keep growing. In this paper we outline the state of the art of humanistic data visualization and other visualization approaches that leverage emotional learning; after that we will suggest strategies for visualizing players’ choices and progress. The result is a concrete example for visualizing behavioral user data leveraging emotional appraisal of information.