Gamifying Tableau: Pitching Marvel Characters Against Each Other

Topics: Tableau, Interactive Dashboard, Spider Charts

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As a Marvel fan, (and to cure my withdrawal symptoms after Secret Invasion ended), I recently started playing their popular mobile game - Marvel Contest of Champions. The concept is simple, you choose your Marvel character and then fight against numerous Marvel characters of ascending power/difficulty as you cross each level. In parallel, I was also searching for a project to experiment with for my next blog and voilà! It occurred to me, what if I could create a basic version of this game in Tableau itself?

The first step of course, was to find a data set about different Marvel characters that would describe their powers and other features about them. After searching around for a while, I finally found this dataset on Kaggle - Marvel Comics Characters Stats and Powers.

PART 1: Understanding the Data

The next step in my journey to create this game was to understand the data that I had on my plate. There were multiple details about each character including their weight, height, race, gender, hair color, skin color, etc. along with a list of their powers. The most important of all powers were the 6 key powers - intelligence, strength, speed, durability, power and combat. Each character received a score out of 100 per power leading to a total score out of 600.

To make sure users are not overwhelmed with data, I decided to group their other more specific powers (eg. energy absorption, telekinesis, elasticity etc.) into 5 categories that I borrowed from the game itself - Biological Engagement, Cosmic, Magic, Mutant and Technology (technically, there was a 6th category in the game too - Combat, however, I excluded it since not a lot of the powers in this list fell into that category). Since there were over 150 specific powers in the list, I used ChatGPT to group these powers into the 5 categories.

PART 2: Creating the Dashboard

The last step of the process was to create the actual dashboard. There were 2 primary features of the dashboard - the ability to filter down characters based on race and the ability to filter/select 2 specific characters that would be competing against each other. Within each character, you could see their total score (which would indicate the winner) and some other descriptive details.

Along with their total score, you could also see a breakdown of how their total score would be split across the 6 key categories of abilities in a radar/"spider" chart - the idea being that the bigger the "web", the more skilled the character is. The spider chart shown here has sextants, meaning 6 equally sized areas that correspond to each of the key abilities. The area covered within each sextant shows the level of the character for that ability.

The last table would give the user an understanding of where the character's powers lie between Biological Engagement, Cosmic, Magic, Mutant and Technology.

The final outcome is below. Feel free to scroll around and pitch your favorite characters against each other to see who would win!

Long Story Short:

As a huge Marvel fan, I decided to pay homage and play around with a fictional characters dataset from the Marvel Comics/Cinematic Universe. In essence, I wanted to see if I could create a basic version of their addictive mobile game - Contest of Champions. While this was my attempt to get creative with tabular data and create engaging dashboards, I do see multiple business use cases for such a dashboard in real life. These include:

a. Sales Analytics: Pitching products against each other to understand their profile, customer base, revenue, profits, costs, inventory, etc.

b. HR Analytics: Understanding multiple people/divisions at once, especially if they are competing with each other.

c. Marketing Analytics: Understanding/judging the performance of 2 advertising channels against each other.

d. Financial/Investment Analytics: Pitching stocks/bonds against each other to understand their profile, growth, dividends, etc.

You can access my visualizations on my Tableau profile: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/anamika.singh6017