Tick-Rate

· 5 min read · 7 figures

Katherine Hayles describes the posthuman subject as “an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components” whose boundaries are continuously reconstructed [1]. Online, those components are spread across different systems, each holding a different part of a person.

Traditional sports produce trophies and medals that make accomplishment visible beyond the competition itself. A player can spend thousands of hours mastering a game, yet that achievement largely remains inside the game itself. Physical rewards can extend achievement beyond the game, but they are difficult to distribute at scale. Riot encountered this directly with League of Legends’ Challenger rewards, citing the “incredible logistical challenge of distributing physical rewards” [2].

I became interested in another possibility. Make the achievement itself more visible. Give ranks and accomplishments somewhere to live beyond the games that issued them.

As I worked on that idea, the scope widened. Gaming has become one of the largest forms of entertainment in the world [3], yet there is still a strange reluctance to make the games we play part of our public identity. I think that is a loss. What someone plays, what they have spent years mastering, what they love, and what they are playing now can say a great deal about who they are.

For the past year I have been designing tick-rate, a platform built around both ideas.

What should a gaming profile communicate?

I kept coming back to four things:

  • Taste: what do you choose to play?
  • History: where have you spent your time?
  • Achievement: what have you demonstrated?
  • Present: what are you doing now?

Those four questions became the structure of the profile.

That structure has changed repeatedly as the profile developed.

From a notebook to profile

The first sketches already contained many of the pieces that remain today: a player identity, favourite games, reviews, lists, activity, and a place for capability.

Fig. 1. Early notebook studies. The capability score, GCR, still occupied the profile-image position.

At that point I was still exploring how these pieces should relate to one another. One sketch places a capability score near the top of the profile. Another separates regular players, professional accomplishments, tournament participation and GCR.

The first working version was much simpler.

Fig. 2. January 2026. A banner, four covers, and three counters.

Over time, the profile became more specific about what each region was supposed to communicate.

Fig. 3. The profile wireframes across four stages

The current profile is the result of that progression.

Taste should describe, not rank

I wanted the profile to have a visual signature for the kinds of games someone plays.

I started looking at circular relationship diagrams, particularly Circos, developed by Martin Krzywinski for visualizing relationships in genomic data [4].

The MLL recombinome of acute leukaemias

Fig. 4. Circos references by Martin Krzywinski: the MLL recombinome and a sketch-to-figure study [4].

The structure transferred well to games. Genres and play styles could sit around the circle while ribbons showed where a player’s history overlapped.

Point at a colour to hold a category. Then follow one of its own threads to read a pair.

In tick-rate:

  • arc length reflects how much a category appears in the player’s history
  • ribbons show overlap between categories
  • interaction exposes the underlying counts

The diagram eventually moved into the avatar itself.

Fig. 5. The taste mark at rest, with a category held, and with a category pair held.

At rest, the player still reads as a normal profile. Hovering or selecting a category brings the taste structure forward.

The mark now works as part of the player’s identity rather than as a separate chart on the page.

Where it is now

Fig. 6. The current profile. Fictional fixture

The banner and avatar establish identity. Favourites, reviews and lists show taste. Activity gives the profile a timeline. Achievements carry ranks and scarce accomplishments. Last played and recent activity give the page a present tense.

tick-rate is still in development.

The current profile is the clearest version I have so far of the question that started the project:

What should someone be able to understand about a player from one page?

The answer today is some combination of:

  • what they like
  • what they have done
  • where they have been
  • what they are doing now

And I expect that answer to keep changing as real players begin using it.

References

  1. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999, Prologue. ↩
  2. Altorfer, Ed “SapMagic.” “/dev: More on 2019 Ranked Rewards.” League of Legends, Riot Games, 29 Oct. 2018. Official Riot source. ↩
  3. Buijsman, Michiel. “Global Games Revenue Cracked $200 Billion in 2025.” Newzoo, 18 June 2026. Newzoo source. ↩
  4. Krzywinski, M., Schein, J., Birol, I., Connors, J., Gascoyne, R., Horsman, D., Jones, S. J., and Marra, M. A. “Circos: An Information Aesthetic for Comparative Genomics.” Genome Research, vol. 19, no. 9, 2009, pp. 1639–1645. circos.ca ↩

Figures

Figures 2, 3, 5 and 6 are screenshots of tick-rate, and the interactive taste chord is a live prototype. Figure 2 and the first slide of figure 3 are real builds; every other capture uses a fictional fixture, so the design can be judged without anyone’s real data. Rank emblems and cover art belong to the games and their publishers and are reproduced here for research only.

Figure 4 reproduces two figures by Martin Krzywinski from circos.ca, for attribution [4].

Figure 1 is from my own notebooks.