Visualisation explains why games-based learning gets a hard time at the same time every year

David McCandless' visualisations reveal amazing things. I've been amused, bemused, intrigued and shocked for the past few years by his Information Is Beautiful blog.

There's one example of visualisation that could help explain why my former colleague Derek Robertson has a regular meet with the press each year, at the same time, justifying (again) why video games are great stimuli for deep learning:

In the video above, McCandless highlights that news stories on violence in video games generally peak in huge numbers around November and April. Why November? It's the month that Christmas releases of video games appear. Why April? It was the month that the Columbine shootings took place and, every year since then, this is the point where the media would like to suggest to us that violent video games were responsible (even though, at the time, it was violent film that made the headlines, video games not yet having attracted that unwelcome kudos).

There you go - if we know it's coming, we can get ready for it.