Abstract
Digital games are complex digital objects that straddle the line between leisure and work, and offer a unique source for contextualizing the role of change in engaging with digital objects. Understanding how complex digital objects evolve over time and how such objects are framed as changing objects allows us to develop a more nuanced model for how different kinds of changes function in the lives of complex digital objects. This paper analyzes several years of patch notes for the digital game League of Legends through the methodology of reading to construct categories of kinds of changes and interpret the different roles of those categories. We propose a taxonomy of changes to a key part of the game ecosystem and describe how the categories in this taxonomy limn a perspective on dynamic, complex digital objects that can lead to more nuanced and robust preservation efforts.
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Gursoy, A., Wickett, K.M., Feinberg, M. (2019). Understanding Change in a Dynamic Complex Digital Object: Reading Categories of Change Out of Patch Notes Documents. In: Taylor, N., Christian-Lamb, C., Martin, M., Nardi, B. (eds) Information in Contemporary Society. iConference 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11420. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_38
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_38
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