Today’s top video-game designer are masters at visualizing information. Every time I buy a new piece of software or use a new website and discover that it’s got a horrid, horrid user interface, I always think — why didn’t they hire a good game designer to do this? The best games are superb at collating massive amounts of information and quickly displaying them in psychologically nuanced ways, rendering rapidly-changing streams of data — your health, your speed, your location, dialogue — as twinkling, glanceable ambient icons. Much like a superbly designed car dashboard, a good video-game display brings Edward Tuftean concision to the art of visualizing information.

Thus I was intrigued to hear about Visitorville — an application that takes a website’s traffic information and renders it as a Sim-City-like world, where each page in a site is a building, and visitors appear as human avatars that travel to and fro. As the Visitorville site describes it:

Buses deliver your visitors to their landing pages. There’s a bus for every major search engine; plus, you can create your own custom buses for any other referrer!

Watch realistic-looking people move around your page. Different avatars exist depending on the type of visitor (commercial, academic, military, etc.).

To move between pages, your visitors take taxis, ambulances, fire trucks — or any other vehicle you like. They each have their own distinctive sound, so you can alert yourself when a particular page is accessed (or even a particular person accessing a page!)

Pretty cool. Though it’d be even cooler to have the reverse: A java application that takes your web site and renders it as a 3D city, so that visitors navigate it like a game inside their web browsers.

(Thanks to Roger Spence for this one!)