 Hi everyone, welcome to this episode of Pixel Data Scapes. I'm your host, Hannah Gunderman, and I'm a data gaming and popular culture librarian at CMU Libraries. I'm really excited by my role here at the libraries, which is all about using games and popular culture to teach about data and data management principles. Pixel Data Scapes is a place where I can use my love of video games to teach you, the viewers, about different concepts in data management. There are so many lessons we can learn about data and data management from video games, and today I'm going to be talking about how we can practice our data management skills by playing Animal Crossing New Horizons. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in. And be aware of spoilers ahead for this game. First, what do I mean when I say data management? Think about the processes you might use to organize things in your day-to-day life, like your spice rack in your kitchen, your bathroom cabinet, your bookshelf, a video game collection, etc. Data management is really just applying these principles of organization to the data that you're producing and using in your research and making sure that this data is organized, described well, and usable in the future not only for yourself, but other people who might reuse your data if that's an option. Different activities that support data management can include using a good file and folder structure when organizing your digital files, having good file names for your data, and writing down detailed documentation about how you were working with your data. As absolutely exciting as I find these concepts, I've met quite a few people who don't really share this same excitement, even though data management is so important. Luckily, in my job at CME Libraries, I get to use popular culture and gaming to teach about data management topics and help people build skills and maybe even some excitement in these areas. A really great way to explore data management skill development is through the video game Animal Crossing New Horizons, one of my favorite video games, and the focus of this episode. Animal Crossing New Horizons was released in March 2020 by Nintendo and is the fifth iteration in the main Animal Crossing series. Since that time, it's amassed a huge amount of players worldwide, myself included. For much of the world, this game was released right when we started to go into lockdown due to the pandemic, and the game provided some much needed comfort and joy during those strange and uncertain times. The game revolves around your player who has purchased an island getaway package from Tom Nook, a character in the game who controls much of the financial and economic aspects of your life on the island. Through crafting, foraging and selling items for bells, which is the currency in the game, and inviting new villagers to your island, you can grow your island's popularity and attract KK Slider, a famed musician in the Animal Crossing universe, to play weekly shows on your island. The game gives you an incredible amount of flexibility to shape your island and make it your own unique virtual space and it can help you own your skills and design and creativity, such as my CMU Libraries branch that I created on my island. But did you know that by playing Animal Crossing New Horizons, you're practicing your data management skills? Let's talk through a few examples of this. Fairly early on in the game, you learn the importance of inventory management, like in so many other video games. In Animal Crossing New Horizons, your player is given a limited amount of inventory space, and you can also think of this as pocket or bag space, where you can hold clothing, foraged items, crafted items, and other things that you might pick up in the game. And just like in those other video games, with this same game mechanic, it can sometimes be a little frustrating when you realize that you've run out of space and can't pick up that thing that you want to pick up. Encountering these moments in Animal Crossing New Horizons forces you to go through your inventory and decide what you can get rid of and what you can keep. Encouraging you to ask questions like, can I sell this item for bells, or could I give this item as a gift to any of my villagers? Having a limited inventory space keeps you on your toes when it comes to collecting items in the game. And I think there's a really strong lesson from this that we can apply towards developing our data management skills. When working with data, we can very quickly become completely overwhelmed by all the files and observations that can result from our analyses. In my conversations with CME researchers, it's not uncommon for even one single analysis to result in multiple terabytes of data. If you're dealing with any sort of limited storage space for this data, this can quickly become a problem. You may find yourself having to ask similar questions to those you encountered when managing your inventory in this game, deciding what is absolutely necessary to keep and what could be put in another location or discarded. This gameplay mechanic in Animal Crossing New Horizons is a great way to practice those useful skills in managing an inventory. Whether that inventory is full of data or full of seashells, sweaters and foraged weeds. The next gameplay mechanic in Animal Crossing New Horizons that allows us to practice our data management skills revolves around the anthropomorphic villagers that inhabit your island in the game. You can form solid friendships with these villagers and even give them gifts and have conversations with them. Your villagers can be assigned to one of eight possible personality types in the game, jock, uchi or sisterly, cranky, normal, lazy, peppy, smug or snooty. Further, each villager has favorite colors and styles, a favorite song from KK Slider, a birthday and hobbies that they do while they're living on the island. Much of this information can impact what gifts you give your villagers and when. It's a lot of information to remember, but luckily there are some great online guides that classify each villager by this information. And this is such a good analogy for code books that we can use with our data. Now these code books are little guides we can make which categorize information about our data. Now this can also be known as metadata such as the variable type, allowable values in a field and the dates of data collection. They are super useful when you are working with your own data and want to record these important details or if someone else is trying to work with your data. Using these online guides that help you navigate how to build friendships with your villagers can also help you practice building and using code books for your own data. Finally, another way we can practice our data management skills in Animal Crossing New Horizons is by crafting items. As you progress through the game, your player learns how to craft new and exciting items through DIY recipes. DIY stands for do it yourself and these recipes show what materials and in what quantity are needed to craft an item. Once you learn the DIY recipe, you'll remember how to replicate that item in the future and you can amass a huge collection of DIY recipes, essentially creating a cookbook for how to build items for your island. As you collect and learn DIY recipes and craft awesome decor, clothing and other items for your island, you're also learning about the importance of having good documentation that describes how to accomplish something. When it comes to data and working with data, we often use software and tools to conduct analyses with our data to help explore a research question. Sometimes we may have to go back and redo an analysis or even try to replicate our analysis. In these situations, it's really nice to have documentation that describes what we did to first perform that analysis. The documentation can essentially be step-by-step instructions that we can use to recreate something that we've done with our data. Without this documentation, we have to rely on our memory alone. And if you're anything like me, you've got a million things happening all at once and it's hard to keep track of it all. By writing down what you do with your data, it can save you so many headaches in the future, especially if you find yourself needing to redo an analysis or recreate something. You can use these DIY recipes as inspiration for writing detailed documentation that tells you everything you need to know about reproducing a certain thing, whether it's a T-test in SPSS or a really cool frozen bear sculpture. Animal Crossing New Horizons is a truly wonderful game that's not only fun and allows for a creative outlet, but it's also a great way to explore foundational data management concepts. I hope this video has been entertaining and helpful for your own research process at CMU. All of us at CMU Libraries are here to support you in your journey in working with data and communicating with data. If you're struggling with advancing your data management skills, feel free to send us an email at data at CMU.libansers.com and we'd be so happy to chat and help you develop a game plan. So until next time, thank you for watching and we'll see you soon.