So I likee my video games.  A lot.  Enough that I’ve had to mail them to another country to save myself.  And I like stats.  Graphs and numbers and stuff that make pretty lines are cool.  Combining the two?  Heaven.

Via the very funny gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun we see that Valve, creators of that wonderful trio of games in The Orange Box, have been watching you, and the stats are something fun to see.  They’ve published info for Half-Life 2: Episode 2, including completion times, hours played, how often people died, etc.  Probably the coolest feature is the ‘death map,’ a kind of infrared map showing areas where players have died.  Thought you were the only one who fell off that cliff in the very beginning?  Not according to the red dot in the picture above.

They’ve also got data on TeamFortress 2, including the tidbit that BLU have a slight edge over RED.  Privacy issues aside (I guess some people object to being watched while they pathetically die over and over in the same place…), this is an interesting method for designing games and hopefully the data will be incorporated into how to make future games more fun.