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“Looking for an Amazing Game I Can Relax and Sink Hours into...”: A Study of Relevance Aspects in Video Game Discovery

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Information in Contemporary Society (iConference 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11420))

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Abstract

With the rapid growth of the video game industry over the past decade, there has been a commensurate increase in research activity focused on a variety of aspects of video games. How people discover the video games they want to play and how they articulate these information needs is still largely unknown, however. A better understanding of video game-related information needs and what makes a game relevant to a user could aid in the design of more effective, domain-specific search engines. In this paper we take a first step towards such domain-specific understanding. We present an analysis of a random sample of 521 complex game requests posted on Reddit. A coding scheme was developed that captures the 41 different aspects of relevance and information needs expressed in these requests. We find that game requests contain an average of close to 5 different relevance aspects. Several of these relevance aspects are geared specifically to video games, while others are more general.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In this paper, we focus exclusively on video games; table-top, role-playing and other game types are not considered.

  2. 2.

    Available at http://reddit.com, last visited September 4, 2018.

  3. 3.

    Available at https://github.com/lucas-tulio/simple-reddit-crawler, last visited September 4, 2018.

  4. 4.

    Agreement scores for all aspects are available at http://toinebogers.com/?page_id=779.

  5. 5.

    Available at https://www.reddit.com/r/tipofmyjoystick/comments/64i787/psa_a_guide_to_better_results, last visited September 9, 2018.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Science, Policy and Information Studies, Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Toine Bogers

  2. Berlin School of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Maria Gäde & Vivien Petras

  3. Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences – Humanities Cluster, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Marijn Koolen

  4. Department of Communication and Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    Mette Skov

Authors
  1. Toine Bogers
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  2. Maria Gäde
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  3. Marijn Koolen
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  4. Vivien Petras
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  5. Mette Skov
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Toine Bogers .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    Natalie Greene Taylor

  2. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Caitlin Christian-Lamb

  3. University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Michelle H. Martin

  4. University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA

    Bonnie Nardi

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Bogers, T., Gäde, M., Koolen, M., Petras, V., Skov, M. (2019). “Looking for an Amazing Game I Can Relax and Sink Hours into...”: A Study of Relevance Aspects in Video Game Discovery. 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_48

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15742-5_48

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15742-5

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