# Death by Pie Chart — The Defensible Decision > A featured arcade title-slide animation: a hungry hero chomping pie charts through a cubicle-corridor maze, extending the book's running argument that pie charts hide comparison. Canonical URL: https://www.thedefensibledecision.com/death-by-pie-chart/ Throughout this book the pie chart is the recurring cautionary example — the chart that looks friendly while quietly hiding the comparison it was asked to make. This page is where it gets its comeuppance. Below is a looping arcade animation built as a talk title slide: a hungry hero chomps pie charts through a maze of office cubicles (each with a monitor showing the honest line chart it should have been). It is deliberately unserious — a warm-up for a room, not a lesson. [Open full-screen ↗](slide.html) ### Why a pie chart, of all charts? The joke lands because the pie chart is the book's most-cited anti-pattern: the human eye compares lengths and positions far more reliably than it compares angles and areas, so a pie asks the audience to do the one perceptual task they are worst at. Swap it for a bar or a line and the comparison becomes readable in a glance. Sending a cheerful arcade hero to eat every pie on screen is just that argument, told as a sight gag. For the real treatment, see the [Chart Gallery](/gallery/) and the chapter on choosing an encoding.