Game Studies at Scale: Towards Facilitating Exploration of Game Corpora

Critically playing a game, and performing a close reading of a specific aspect of a game, are valid game analysis techniques. But these types of analyses don’t scale to the plethora of games available, and also neglect implementation aspects of the games which themselves are texts that can be analyzed. We argue that appropriate software tools can support research in game studies, allowing individual games to be read at the level of gameplay as well as the implementation level. Moreover, these tools permit analysis to scale in a similar fashion as distant reading allows for traditional texts, and be applied to an entire corpus of games. We illustrate these ideas using a corpus of games created using the Graphic Adventure Creator, a program first released in 1985 for a number of computing platforms. As a proof of concept, we have built a system called GrACIAS – the Graphic Adventure Creator Internal Analysis System – that we have used for both static and dynamic analysis of this corpus of games, effectively allowing them to be internally explored and “read.” Furthermore, our system is able to look for game solutions automatically and has solved over 60 game images to date, making the games accessible to researchers, but also people who may not be expert players or even able to understand the language the game uses

A Qualitative Investigation of Users’ Video Game Information Needs and Behaviors

Video games are popular consumer products as well as research subjects, yet little exists about how players and other stakeholders find video games and what information they need to select, acquire, and play video games. With the aim of better understanding people’s game-related information needs and behaviors, we conducted 56 semi-structured interviews with users who find, play, purchase, collect, and recommend video games. Participants included casual and avid gamers, parents, collectors, industry professionals, librarians, and scholars. From this user data, we derive and discuss key design implications for video game information systems: designing for target user populations, enabling recommendations on appeals, offering multiple automatic organization options, and providing relationship-based, user-generated, subject and visual metadata. We anticipate this work will contribute to building future video game information systems with new and improved access to games

A conceptual model for video games and interactive media

In this paper, we describe a conceptual model for video games and interactive media. Existing conceptual models such as the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) are not adequate to represent the unique descriptive attributes, levels of variance, and relationships among video games. Previous video game-specific models tend to focus on the development of video games and their technical aspects. Our model instead attempts to reflect how users such as game players, collectors, and scholars understand video games and the relationships among them. We specifically consider use cases of gamers, with future intentions of using this conceptual model as a foundation for developing a union catalog for various libraries and museums. In the process of developing the model, we encountered many challenges, including conceptual overlap and divergence from FRBR, entity scoping, complex relationships among entities, and to the question of how to model additional content for game expansion. Future work will focus on making this model interoperable with existing ontologies as well as further understanding and description of content and relationships.Ope