User-centered approach in creating a metadata schema for video games and interactive media

Abstract

Video games and interactive media are increasingly becoming important part of our culture and everyday life, and subsequently, of archival and digital library collections. However, existing organizational systems often use vague or inconsistent terms to describe video games or attempt to use schemas designed for textual bibliographic resources. Our research aims to create a standardized metadata schema and encoding scheme that provides an intelligent and comprehensive way to represent video games. We conducted interviews with 24 gamers, focusing on their video game-related information needs and seeking behaviors. We also performed a domain analysis of current organizational systems used in catalog records and popular game websites, evaluating metadata elements used to describe games. With these results in mind, we created a list of elements which form a metadata schema for describing video games, with both a core set of 16 elements and an extended set of 46 elements providing more flexibility in expressing the nature of a game.

Relationships among video games: Existing standards and new definitions

“…Series) aggregating games at different levels of abstraction, and how games relate to these grouping entities. Nevertheless, representing these relationships is essential for a number of use cases (discussed in Lee et al, 2013a).…”

“…Cultural heritage institutions with video game collections require robust, media-specific metadata to describe a wide variety of video games and serve a variety of use cases (Lee et al, 2013b). However, current systems and standards from both library and commercial settings fall short due to issues of inaccuracy, inconsistency, and ambiguity (Lee et al, 2013a). In response, the GAme MEtadata Research (GAMER) Group at the University of Washington Information School, in partnership with the Seattle Interactive Media Museum (SIMM), has been developing a standardized metadata schema and controlled vocabularies for video games (Lee et al, 2013a).…”

“…However, current systems and standards from both library and commercial settings fall short due to issues of inaccuracy, inconsistency, and ambiguity (Lee et al, 2013a). In response, the GAme MEtadata Research (GAMER) Group at the University of Washington Information School, in partnership with the Seattle Interactive Media Museum (SIMM), has been developing a standardized metadata schema and controlled vocabularies for video games (Lee et al, 2013a). In conjunction with this work, Jett et al (under review) created a conceptual model for video games designed to facilitate effective description, organization, and access from a user-centered perspective.…”

An Ontological Framework for Describing Games

“…The latter activity has been pursued in three ways with respect to video games: describing aspects of video game design [17], describing attributes and properties of video games that support archival provenance modeling [13], and describing entities, attributes, and relationships that support rich bibliographic description of video games [10,8,7]. All of these efforts are responding to a burgeoning need to preserve and examine video games, and games in general, as rich cultural heritage objects.…”

“What Am I Fighting For?”: Creating a Controlled Vocabulary for Video Game Plot Metadata

“…For some users, it is the most important aspect of the gamethe key reason for deciding what to purchase or play, and even for tolerating poor gameplay. 1 However, existing organizational systems including library catalogs or game-related websites do not sufficiently describe the plot metadata.…”