We are happy to announce that the LudaViz project has published its first paper. A poster paper was accepted and presented at CHI 2026 in Barcelona. The paper titled “How Players Recognize and Interpret Diegetic Visualizations – The Case of Fortnite’s Swarm Visualization” is available open access on this link.
Abstract: Data visualization is a key part in many videogames as players need it to understand the current game state and react accordingly. While non-diegetic data visualizations in games have been widely studied, diegetic data visualizations have received little attention. In this work, we contribute to the latter by looking into the diegetic visualization used by Fortnite during Chapter 6: Season 4 to show how The Swarm spread over the map. Through an online survey with 80 participants, we explored how players recognized, interpreted, and acted upon this form of diegetic visualization. We found that participants were able to recognize and interpret the swarm areas through the diegetic indicators and that they adjusted their behavior based on them. However, the behavioral response varied based on the current in-game situation. We further reflect on some potential avenues for future research.
The team had accompanied the poster to the venue where it was received well by the other attendees. The discussions and feedback received will be fruitful for further inquiry in the projects. We see this study as a prologue to the LudaViz project allowing us to gather empirical data on what we can define as ludic data visualization.
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The poster, in PDF format is here below!