With a strong game development scene spread around the country, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the United States is the setting for over 2,500 video games. However, we desperately want to know which states and cities get the most virtual love. Thankfully, someone has done that time-intensive detective work, and even created some beautiful visualizations.
To figure out these stats, the folks at Guide Strats used Wikipedia data to see which locations were tagged on over 15,000 video games. Even if a lot of the scraping was done automatically, we don't envy the process. We do, however, love the results. And while their full article also covers games set in other countries, we're focused here on the US.
Key Findings:
-
In terms of states, it's not much of a surprise that New York and California take the top two spots with 501 and 482 games, respectively. The third-place finish is surprising though — Nevada is the setting of 148 games, despite only ranking number 33 in terms of population.
-
New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco take the top three spots for cities — that all checks out from a popularity and cultural cachet perspective. Las Vegas, Nevada, Chicago, Illinois, and Washington, DC, aren't that far behind, though. New Orleans, Louisiana, ends up in spot number 10 — we'd love to see more games set there.
-
Iowa comes in last place with zero games associated with the state. Delaware, Alabama and North Dakota can't brag though — they have only a piddling two games each.
Click images to enlarge.
Via Guide Strats.
