Document Type

Article

Date

2015

Keywords

Video games, Interactive media, user needs, user behavior, metadata

Language

English

Disciplines

Cataloging and Metadata | Game Design | Library and Information Science

Description/Abstract

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.

Additional Information

"A Qualitative Investigation of Users’ Video Game Information Needs and Behaviors" first appeared in Journal of Information Science, through SAGE Publishing's OnlineFirst initiative, December 11, 2015.

http://jis.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/12/05/0165551515618594.abstract

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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