Beyond Dashboards: How I Transformed Streaming Data into an Interactive Pac-Man Adventure (A 2025 Look Back)

More Than Just Dots and Ghosts: A Data Engineer’s Journey into Gamifying Live Streams for Truly Engaging Viz

Yeah, that’s Pac-Man, but those dots? Live Meetup RSVPs. Pretty wild, huh? More on how this came to be, below.

Data visualization has always been a fascinating intersection of art and science for me. As data professionals, we strive to transform raw numbers and dense summaries into insightful, even beautiful, charts and graphics. Communities like Reddit’s r/dataisbeautiful are a testament to this creative drive.

Visualizing streaming data isn’t new. We can tap into live feeds, build robust ETL pipelines with tools like Apache Flink, Spark, or Kafka Streams, and then channel this processed data into systems like Elasticsearch for consumption by dashboards in Kibana, Grafana, or other tools. Many of us have seen Kibana dashboards dynamically refresh, perhaps even displayed on a large office TV, showing key metrics in near real-time. It’s powerful, undoubtedly.

But during a hackathon at Meetup a few years back (around 2018, to be precise!), I found myself craving something more. More interaction. More fun.

The “What If?” Moment: Could Streaming Data Fuel a Game?