Developing a Video Game Metadata Schema for the Seattle Interactive Media Museum

Syracuse University Syracuse University

SURFACE at Syracuse University SURFACE at Syracuse University

School of Information Studies - Faculty

Scholarship

School of Information Studies (iSchool)

3-2013

Developing a Video Game Metadata Schema for the Seattle Developing a Video Game Metadata Schema for the Seattle

Interactive Media Museum Interactive Media Museum

Rachel I. Clarke

Syracuse University

Jin Ha Lee

University of Washington

Joseph T. Tennis

University of Washington

Michael Carpenter

University of Washington

Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/istpub

Part of the Cataloging and Metadata Commons

Recommended Citation Recommended Citation

Clarke, Rachel I.; Lee, Jin Ha; Tennis, Joseph T.; and Carpenter, Michael, "Developing a Video Game

Metadata Schema for the Seattle Interactive Media Museum" (2013).

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Developing a Video Game Metadata Schema for the Seattle Interactive Media Developing a Video Game Metadata Schema for the Seattle Interactive Media

Museum Museum

Description/Abstract Description/Abstract

As interest in video games increases, so does the need for intelligent access to them. However, traditional

organizational systems and standards fall short. In order to Bll this gap, we are collaborating with the

Seattle Interactive Media Museum to develop a formal metadata schema for video games. In the paper,

we describe how the schema was established from a user-centered design approach and introduce the

core elements from our schema. We also discuss the challenges we encountered as we were conducting

a domain analysis and cataloging real-world examples of video games. Inconsistent, vague, and

subjective sources of information for title, genre, release date, feature, region, language, developer and

publisher information conBrm the importance of developing a standardized description model for video

games.

Keywords Keywords

Video games, metadata schema, multimedia, interactive media, cultural artifacts, Seattle Interactive

Media Museum

Disciplines Disciplines

Cataloging and Metadata | Library and Information Science

Additional Information Additional Information

"Developing a Video Game Metadata Schema for the Seattle Interactive Media Museum" Brst appeared in

International Journal on Digital Libraries

, Vol. 13, Issue 2, pp. 105-117. The Bnal publication is available at

Springer via http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00799-013-0103-x.

Creative Commons License Creative Commons License

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

This article is available at SURFACE at Syracuse University: https://surface.syr.edu/istpub/169

Developing a Video Game Metadata Schema

for the Seattle Interactive Media Museum

Jin Ha Lee, Joseph T. Tennis, Rachel Ivy Clarke, Michael Carpenter

Information School, University of Washington, Mary Gates Hall, Ste 370, Seattle,

WA 98195, USA

Phone: 206.685.0153

Fax: 206.616.3152

E-mail: jinhalee@uw.edu; [email protected]; raclar[email protected]; carp1[email protected]

URL: http://ischool.uw.edu/

Abstract: As interest in video games increases, so does the need for intelligent access to them.

However, traditional organizational systems and standards fall short. In order to fill this gap, we

are collaborating with the Seattle Interactive Media Museum to develop a formal metadata schema

for video games. In the paper, we describe how the schema was established from a user-centered

design approach and introduce the core elements from our schema. We also discuss the challenges

we encountered as we were conducting a domain analysis and cataloging real-world examples of

video games. Inconsistent, vague, and subjective sources of information for title, genre, release

date, feature, region, language, developer and publisher information confirm the importance of

developing a standardized description model for video games.

Keywords: Video games, Metadata schema, Multimedia, Interactive media,

Cultural artifacts, Seattle Interactive Media Museum

Abbreviations: SIMM: Seattle Interactive Media Museum; FRBR: Functional Requirements for

Bibliographic Records; OCLC: Online Computer

Library Center;

1. Introduction

Recent years demonstrate an immense surge of interest in video games. 72% of

American households play video games, and in 2010,the game industry generated

$25.1 billion in revenue (ESA, 2011). Industry analysts expect the global gaming

market to reach $91 billion by 2015 (GIA, 2009). This increased pervasiveness

inspires design and development as well as consumer consumption, amplifying

the power of the video game market in the global economy. Video games are also

increasingly of interest in scholarly and educational communities. Studies of

games across disciplines like computer science, communication and media

studies, arts and humanities, and social sciences aim to examine the roles of

games in society and interactions around games and game players (Winget, 2011).

Games are also of significant interest to the education community, with a focus on

how games can be used as learning tools and technologies (Gee, 2003). Video

games are entrenched in American economic, cultural, and academic systems.

As games become more embedded in our lives and culture, providing intelligent

access to these forms of interactive media becomes increasingly important.

Effectiveness of information access is a direct function of the intelligence put into

organization of that information (Svenonius, 2000). Consumers, manufacturers,

scholars and educators all need meaningful ways of organizing video game

collections for access. Current organizational systems for video games, however,

are severely lacking due to the challenges rooted in the unique nature of video

games as cultural artifacts and the lack of efforts for standardization. As a result,

many systems use different labels for metadata elements as well as different

vocabularies to describe games. The objective of our study is to create a metadata

schema that can capture the essential information about video games and

interactive media in a standardized way. This will allow for better navigation

through a game collection as well as improved interoperability across multiple

organizational systems. Improving organization and access will not only enhance

people’s gaming experiences, but also have substantial commercial and cultural

consequences.

2. Challenges and Critical Literature Analysis

Current models of video game organization come from two divergent sources.

First is the contemporary field of knowledge organization, a subset of library and

information science (LIS) that specializes in arranging, describing, and presenting

metadata for information objects and collections. Historically, these collections

focus mostly on books and similar documents, treating artifacts like video games

as products of popular culture and therefore of less scholarly value.

Describing non-book artifacts with LIS standards has long been problematic.

Hagler (1980) observed that imposing book-based characteristics on non-book

materials leaves these items in the lurch: unlike books, video games do not come

with title pages, so traditional library standards based on title pages are unusable.

An ongoing lack of principles for describing non-book items results in description

based on physical form, rather than intellectual content (Leigh, 2002). This

becomes especially problematic with the exponential increase in born-digital

items, since their physical form itself is debatable. Items such as software,

contemporary digital art, and video games are now created specifically in and for

a digital, electronic environment. Descriptions based on physical form are no

longer applicable to these items. Digital media are defined as much—or even

more—by their performativity and interactive nature than by any physical

characteristics (Reinhart, 2007).

A significant attempt to overcome some of these obstacles, Functional

Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), was developed to be a

generalized view of the bibliographic universe independent of any cataloging code

or implementation (Tillett, 2004). FRBR is a conceptual model representing the

entities and relationships of the bibliographic universe, where attributes and

relationships of bibliographic entities are defined and described based on main

generic user tasks in searching and using national bibliographies and library

catalogs (IFLA Study Group on the FRBR, 1998; Kruth, 2001). In FRBR, there

are four different levels of bibliographic entities: work (intellectual/artistic

creation), expression (work realized in the form of notation, sound, image, etc.),

manifestation (physical embodiment of an expression), and item (an exemplar of a

manifestation). However, applying the FRBR model to video games presents

fundamental problems: McDonough et al. (2010) tried to apply the FRBR model

to a classic computer game but could not easily determine work, expression,

manifestation, or item. Despite FRBR’s attempt at a comprehensive set of

attributes, there are still limitations due to missing characteristics germane to

interactive media. Attributes derived from the context of a cultural object, like a

user’s reaction to an object (e.g., mood), or similarity-based relationships (e.g.,

similar games)--which can be significant in the context of video games--are not

represented in the FRBR model (Lee, 2010). Winget and Murray (2008) also

argue for the importance of collecting information related to the “context of use”

for video games.

Other existing content and object description standards are similarly problematic,

and illustrate the glaring lack of innovation in game description. Unlike other

digital media, games lack specific controlled vocabularies for subject and genre.

For instance, digital art is sufficiently served by established topical art

vocabularies like the Getty’s Art & Architecture Thesaurus and the Thesaurus for

Graphic Materials in conjunction with the Library of Congress Subject Headings

(Hanlon & Copeland, 2001). Video games have no such specialized indexing

language, and the general-purpose Library of Congress Subject Headings contains

only 219 headings for describing different video games by name (e.g., Dead or

Alive, Halo, Legend of Zelda), with many notable series missing (e.g., Final

Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Mass Effect, God of War). There are a mere 5 headings

with regards to genre (Computer adventure games, Computer baseball games,

Computer flight games, Computer war games, and Computer word games),

clearly limiting the ability to describe and therefore search or browse games by

genre.

Recently, the LIS community demonstrated increased interest in the preservation

of video games, notably the “Preserving Virtual Worlds” project (McDonough et

al., 2010) which identifies several challenges for preserving virtual worlds and

suggests metadata description as a preservation strategy. Winget (2011)’s review

of video game preservation literature reveals a focus on games as artifacts thus

limited to traditional preservation challenges of hardware, software, emulation,

and scope. In addition to an emphasis on preservation rather than description, both

projects focus on game information from a data- or creator-centric point of view,

rather than that of the end user.

Currently, the only systematically designed game-specific descriptive framework

comes from a German master’s thesis by Huth (2004), who drew existing

elements from OCLC Metadata Elements (OCLC, 2003), the Dublin Core

Metadata Element Set (DCMI, 2003) and added new elements. The metadata is

organized into five groups: Representation, Reference, Provenance, Fixity, and

Context (Anderson, 2010). But this schema only addressed early game systems

not reflective of today’s gaming environment, especially with regards to newer

innovations like online real-time games involving multiple users. Huth’s

approach, like those above, reveals a focus on historical preservation with little

provision for users’ needs and desire for access from their own perspectives and

their behaviors. This limited understanding of video games and their users in the

LIS community is an impediment to developing useful information systems that

meet the needs of real users.

The second source of video game organization and description comes from

commercial systems, mainly on the Internet. Although the web contains massive

information about video games, it is scattered across many sites and sources.

Websites such as Amazon.com, Moby Games, allgame.com, Giantbomb, IGN,

GameFAQs, GameSpot, etc. are generally geared toward gamers making purchase

decisions and so provide only basic descriptive elements like title, genre, release

date, and publisher. Other informational websites such as Wikipedia provide a

large amount of descriptive information, but it is often unstructured, cumbersome

to navigate, unvetted and unverified. As a result, users often have to jump to

multiple places to find and cross-check different types of information from these

multiple sites.

The metadata across these websites is also uncontrolled, meaning that there is no

accepted standard for describing games in a consistent manner. Without clear,

comprehensive descriptions it can be challenging to collocate similar games or

generate recommendations for new games based on what a user enjoyed in a

previous playing experience. Many commercial game websites use their own

vocabularies for describing information such as game genre. These genre labels

are not formally designed according to established standards or principles, and

often do not match or crosswalk across different sites. For instance, a “platform”

game (where players navigate the game by making characters jump from one

platform to another) is classed as a sub-genre under “action” on allgames.com, but

identified as its own separate genre by IGN Entertainment (ign.com), while Moby

Games fails to include it at all. Furthermore, the genre labels tend to be general

and therefore too broad and vague to be of any use. The “role-playing” category

on Moby Games retrieves 3,727 results, making the category impossible to

browse.

Even searching for a known game is difficult because a set of primary access

points for games is not clear or consistently agreed upon. With other cultural

objects such as books, music, or movies, the name of the artifacts’ creator,

composer/performer, or director are commonly provided as primary access points,

respectively. With games, however, the group of people involved in creating a

game is typically very large, making attribution to a single artist or creator

difficult. It is also unclear if users even know or remember the names of

designers, or if they are even interested in finding games this way. In addition,

other feasible access points like characters, music tracks, or motifs have not been

adequately explored on the user’s behalf. Indeed, it is currently unknown which

elements of video games would make for the most useful access points. All these

challenges indicate the need for a more formal and standardized representation of

video games based on a user-centered approach.

3. Study Design

3.1. Method

At the University of Washington Information School, we have been collaborating

with the Seattle Interactive Media Museum (SIMM), recently established by

Andrew Perti and Michael Carpenter, to develop a new metadata schema for

describing all aspects of video games for improved organization and access.

While the SIMM is interested in the preservation of video games and related

materials, their objective also includes aggregation, research and exhibition of

interactive media culture and the physical, digital, and abstract artifacts therein,

therefore implying a need for robust, media-specific metadata to serve a variety of

use cases. As an emergent organization, the SIMM provides an optimal crucible

for creating such a schema.

In the Autumn quarter of 2011, the authors, colleagues from the SIMM, and

graduate students participated in a special topics course “Video Game Metadata”

at the University of Washington Information School. The course was designed to

offer interested students the opportunity to collaborate with the authors as well as

the creators of the SIMM in order to get hands-on experience in creating a

metadata schema for use in a real-world application.

The majority of the course focused on user- and document-based analyses in order

to determine metadata elements crucial to describing video games. First, different

personas epitomizing the most common types of game players and potential

SIMM patrons were developed. A persona is an archetype representing the needs,

behaviors, and goals of a particular group of users and using personas enables a

goal-directed design of a system (Cooper, 1999). The 6 personas that emerged

were Player (Jeffrey, a Junior High Student), Parent (Marcia, a Classroom

Assistant and a mother of 3), Collector (Sam, a Copywriter for Amazon.com),

Academic (Dr. Russell, an Economics professor), Game Developer/Designer

(Debra, a Game Designer), and Curator/Librarian (Nancy, an Academic

Librarian). Full descriptions of the six personas and the use scenarios are included

in Appendix I. Based on these personas we created several use scenarios for the

SIMM website which helped us in selecting metadata elements that would be

useful for each user group.

After creating these personas and use cases, we compiled a master list of metadata

elements from a number of major commercial, hobby, and review websites related

to video games including Mobygame, Giantbomb, Allgame, Amazon, Gamefaqs,

Wikipedia, etc. This constituted the primary form of domain analysis. This

follows the method highlighted in Hjørland (2002). In his work, Hjørland

identified ways domains can be studied and understood in order to create

metadata. We used the extant sources of information organization listed above in

order to see how the domain was shaped, what was listed, and where there were

lacunae. We also brainstormed several additional elements that might be useful

for the specified personas and other people interested in video games. We ended

up with a list of 61 different information features and went over them one by one,

trying to determine if they were necessary or potentially useful from the

perspective of each persona. The following table shows what we determined to be

the relative importance of each element for different personas. The solid circle

denotes the features that were regarded as highly important for the persona and the

unfilled circle denotes features that would potentially be helpful but not necessary.

The table only shows the select elements that were deemed important for multiple

personas, not the full list of 61 elements.

Table 1. The Relative Importance of Metadata Elements for the Five Personas

3.2. Limitations

Personas can be a very useful tool in design, although they are not free from

limitations. Previous literature notes challenges in defining the right personas and

verifying that personas accurately reflect user data (Grudin and Pruitt, 2002;

Chapman and Milham, 2006). Generally, persona-based approaches for design

can be most successfully used when the designers have a good understanding of

the persona types that will be using the system and thus be able to see the world

from the personas’ points of view (i.e., perspective taking) (Bagnall et al., 2005).

The fact that this research was carried out in a class environment enabled us to

have at least one or more persons who actually fit into each persona type .This

allowed us to make reasonable assumptions about the users’ motivations and

behaviors. Another limitation is that the persona type can be too broad and may

not accurately represent the goals, needs, desires, and knowledge of a particular

class of users, especially when inferences are made based on personas’ high

specificity (Chapman and Milham, 2006). Considering these limitations, the

authors do not intend to solely rely on personas for creating our metadata schema.

In conjunction with domain analysis from numerous game-related websites,

personas can serve as a powerful tool for establishing the initial set of core

metadata elements. However, this is part of a bigger project that aims to establish

a more complete set of metadata elements in multiple stages. For our future steps,

we will be conducting in-depth user interviews as well as a large scale survey in

order to obtain more user data that would help us improve our selection and

evaluation of metadata elements. Our broader intention is to take multiple user-

centered design methods to maintain and continue to improve our schema over

time.

4. The Core Metadata Elements

Based on the investigation of personas and different use scenarios as well as the

information in Table 1, we decided to focus on establishing an initial set of core

elements that should be described by any system attempting to organize video

games and interactive media. Our final CORE set consists of 16 elements that

were deemed useful for a range of user groups: Title, Edition, Platform, Format,

Developer, Publisher, Retail Release Date, Number of Players, Online

Capabilities, Special Hardware, Genre, Series/Franchise, Region, Rating,

Language, and UPC. We have borrowed and modified the definitions from

existing standards such as FRBR (for Edition, Developer, Retail Release Date,

and Language) and CIDOC CRM (for Title) in order to maintain some degree of

interoperability for common elements. However, for other elements, we had to

create definitions based on the group discussion on what each of the elements

referred to, since we could not find reusable definitions from existing standards.

Details of each element are described in Table 2. Through discussion, we decided

that the element “system requirements” in Table 1 should be split into “online”

and “special hardware” in order to reduce ambiguity.

Table 2. The 16 CORE Metadata Elements

After we decided upon the 16 CORE elements in our metadata schema, the

remainder of the quarter-long class was dedicated to testing the usability of the

schema. We collected 30 games and attempted to catalog them according to the

schema. Games for this exercise were carefully selected to present a variety of

genres, platforms, creators, and editions. Additionally, we selected games with

widely varying packaging and documentation elements in order to test the

efficacy of each chief source of information. The full list of games tested in the

exercise is included in Appendix II.

5. Discussion

As we progressed through the cataloging exercise, many challenges for describing

video games emerged. Some of the problems are unique to video games and

others are commonly encountered when describing and organizing other non-

textual information objects.

5.1. Information Sourcing Issues

While each CORE element includes a specific definition and chief source of

information, sourcing this information still proved problematic. It is important to

note that under the direction of the SIMM, we strove to describe each game at the

Manifestation level of the FRBR model of description. This means that each game

is described at what is widely considered the “edition” level in the domain of

video games. The reasoning behind this decision is closely related to what we

intend this core set of metadata to be. CORE16 were selected as the most general

and essential information about games that should be recorded for describing any

video game collection. Item level description such as the condition and

provenance of the item will certainly be critical in some environments (e.g., for a

video game museum curator), but not in others (e.g., online database for video

games; commercial websites for video games). This decision was also partly due

to the fact that we are designing our schema from a user-centered approach, and

our assumption is that for general users, the item level description would not be

sought as often as the manifestation level description. The item level description

will most likely be included as we move onto the second phase of the project

which focuses on establishing a recommended set of metadata elements, an

expansion of the CORE16.

Because of this stipulation from the SIMM with regards to the focus on the

manifestation level, rather than describing games at the more granular Item level

of FRBR (e.g. an actual game cartridge or optical disc) we identified and defined

a chief source of information that would encompass many FRBR Items. Thus, for

each element, the most commonly cited sources of information include the

housing of material of a game, such as the box, manual, and/or cartridge.

However, as previously noted, this traditional view focused on physicality

becomes problematic very quickly. Some contemporary games are born digital

and available to users via download, meaning they have no boxes, no cartridges,

and only rarely have manuals (usually in the form of on-screen instructions rather

than printed materials). This immediately challenges our established designations

of chief source of information for many of our CORE elements. Many of these

games come without a reliable physical source; without this, we have no access to

critical metadata except by playing the game itself. For some games, we were able

to find a different version released for another platform in a game box with a

manual (e.g., Plant vs. Zombies released for Microsoft Windows). However,

finding a physical counterpart is not always possible, as some games are

developed exclusively as direct downloadable apps for tablets and smartphones

(e.g. Chaos Rings for iOS/Android). Other desirable descriptive information

deemed important to users could not be sourced from the games themselves, but

was only available via secondary sources. Even when secondary sources of

information were found, the quality of the information varied immensely.

5.1.1. Inconsistent, Vague and Undefined Source Information

For example, “retail release date” is an element that all participants agreed to be

important for all the user personas. The release date information of a game can

provide a lot of contextual information about the game to users. For instance, for

an RPG game, the release date can shed some insights into what kind of visual

style, battle system, and the level of difficulty may be expected. The release date

can also heavily affect the purchase decision of gamers, be useful for historical

analysis of video game trends for scholars, and will be important for curators for

preserving the accurate information about the artifacts. However, as we started

cataloging examples of actual games, it became evident that there is in fact no

reliable source of this information. The only date information we can obtain from

the game itself is the copyright date. Using copyright date information for the

release date is problematic, especially for games that belong to a particular series.

was published and thus does not apply to any of the later manifestations. Also for

early games developed prior to the early 1990s, this information is not well-

documented, which makes it difficult to determine the exact date, especially for

games that have multiple versions released (McDonough et al., 2010). We also

had an extended discussion on how specific this information should be – in other

words, is the publication year sufficient, or should we include month information,

or do we need an exact date? Our final decision to preserve the exact date was due

to the fact that for most current games, data at this level is usually obtainable

without too much difficulty, and it is better to preserve more information than

less. We acknowledge that for older games, we might only be able to obtain and

record the publication year.

We explored different ways to obtain this information. First, we looked at

different websites including Wikipedia, Amazon, GameSpot, GameFaqs, etc.

Using multiple sources to find and cross-check the release date for the game

seemed to work for some cases, but often we found conflicting information on

these multiple sites. For instance, the release date for the North American version

of the game Shenmue on Wikipedia is November 6, 2000, as opposed to

November 7 on Gamespot, and November 8 on Allgame.com. While the

difference in date might be perceived as insignificant for average gamers, it does

pose a problem for identifying and preserving these games from an organizational

point of view, such as that of the SIMM. While specific game company websites

turned out to be the most reliable source of release date information, most did not

carry information about all the games that they published. This is especially

problematic for games published by now-defunct companies. We contacted some

game companies such as ATLUS and SquareEnix, and were told that there is no

single person who manages such information to whom they could point us. We

believe this is probably a common issue across game companies, especially

because many are short-lived or merge with other companies.

The “genre” element also suffered from inconsistent information sources. Genre is

one of the few elements that describes the content of a game rather than

descriptive features. Therefore, it was perceived as the most useful information for

browsing a video game collection as well as discovering new games to play. As

we investigated hundreds of genre labels from different sources of genre

classification for video games, it became evident that genre metadata is

uncontrolled, meaning that there is no accepted standard for describing games in a

consistent manner, or even correctly. On most websites, we could not even find

definitions for the genre labels. Many commercial game websites use their own

terms for describing information like genre, with local definitions that do not

match across different sites: for instance, on Mobygames.com, both Super Mario

Bros. and Grand Theft Auto are classified as “action” although most people would

agree that they are very different. Most of us agreed that these current labels are

general and too broad and vague to be of any use. We recommend taking a new

approach in describing the genre information of games which is discussed further

in section 5.3.

5.1.2. Subjective Source Information

Another issue with source information is the potential lack of objectivity.

“Features” was a highly debated metadata element that was ultimately excluded

from the CORE elements. The problem with this element is that it is impossible to

obtain consistent information, even with a designated chief source of information,

which makes it difficult and time-consuming for catalogers and searchers.

Commercial websites such as Amazon often include the description of features

although it is unclear as to where this information is derived from. Some websites

such as Allgame.com have their own list of features whereas others do not list any

feature information at all.

During our cataloging activities, most of us ended up entering a wide variety of

information for this element that could potentially be useful but not represented in

any other field. Thus it ended up taking the role of a traditional “notes” field.

Deciding to faithfully transcribe the features listed on the designated chief source

of information (i.e., the game box in the case of the “features” element) allowed

us to maintain some consistency in our data entry. However, we learned that many

games contain text that is heavily geared toward marketing rather than objectively

describing the features of the game (e.g., “Unleash over 100 mind-blowing spells”

from Disgaea; “The Fun-Dead Game of the Year” from Plants vs. Zombies). Our

discussion ended with three divergent suggestions: 1) there needs to be a list of

controlled vocabularies from which catalogers can choose features; 2) this field

should be left similar to the notes field where catalogers can decide to leave any

information that they think would be useful for the system users; 3) this element

should be populated with a verbatim transcription from the box, marketing

hyperbole and all, in order to preserve the historical accuracy of the chief source

of information.

5.2. Unclear Conceptual Boundaries

Several elements thought to be useful to all personas as well as the SIMM

suffered from unclear conceptual boundaries. Despite clear element definitions,

teasing out the differences in descriptive information from the sources of

information is challenging at best. This is perhaps due to incompatibility of

established descriptions, definitions and concepts with those emergent from the

specific domain of video games. Video games clearly diverge from the established

FRBR conceptual model; however, many bibliographic description elements are

still linked to this conception and so reflected in the CORE elements. It is for this

reason that we believe we can contribute to content description standards. Both

the Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard and the Cataloging Cultural

Objects (CCO) standard do not explicitly address the conceptual model of video

games as an entity for description. In the case of RDA, video games are

considered containers of moving images and nothing more (Canadian Library

Association et al., 2010). In fact there is no definition of video game in RDA.

CCO (Baca et al., 2006) is likewise agnostic with regard to the conceptual

boundaries and definition of video games. Cultural objects, the purview of CCO,

are left to the cataloguer and his or her institution to decide. This leaves room for

a more specific conceptualization of metadata required for video games, like what

we offer here.

5.2.1. Region and Language

Region information is necessary for players because most of the console games

are locked via hardware restrictions, to a particular region such as North America

(NTSC U/C), Japan and Asia (NTSC-J), and Europe and Oceania (PAL). Some

games, like smartphone apps, are free of those regional restrictions, but can still

be targeted for audiences speaking particular languages. In cases like such, it can

be unclear as to what to describe as the “region” of the game. There can also be

cases where the game is released in a particular country without being localized,

meaning a Japanese game can be released in Korea without being translated into

Korean. If so, should the “region” information include Japan as well as Korea?

Also there are cases where the game is available in multiple languages although it

is still locked to particular region: for instance, a game originally released in Japan

and later published in North America can have an option for Japanese subtitles

and/or voice acting. In this case, should the main language be Japanese or

English? All these cases suggest that it is necessary to have a fairly detailed rule

on how to describe the language and region information.

5.2.2. Developer vs. Publisher

The box of the game usually has different names and logos representing the

companies involved in producing the game. The challenge we encountered was

that without consulting other online sources, it was often difficult to determine

which company represents the publisher versus the developers. The problem is

further complicated by the fact that some companies actually can be publishers as

well as developers of the games. Sometimes this information can be found inside

the manual but this was not consistently true for all cases. For older games, some

of the companies have already dissolved and it was difficult to find any

information about the particular organization based on a company name, logo, or

acronym. In addition, there are many different ways of describing the company

(for instance, Nintendo, Nintendo Corp., Nintendo US) so there must be a

controlled vocabulary listing the preferred form of these names of organizations.

This problem is not unfamiliar to archivists writing administrative history of a

fonds (body of records created by an organization). Both Cook (1993) and Millar

(2002) have described the mercurial nature of organizations. The records of an

organization are meant to reflect the ordinary course of business. However, when

business changes, so too does the structure of records creation. We see that

manifest in this context with the changing organizational structure of game

companies. A full archival contextual analysis of game companies would help

make this aspect of metadata more robust and meaningful, but also more complex

as we would need to represent the change in the organization over time.

5.3. Need for Better Subject Access

In most video game descriptions that are currently available on various websites

and catalogs, the only prominent access point provided for any kind of subject

access to the games is genre information. For our cataloging exercise, we

established a preliminary controlled list of genre and style labels from which

catalogers could select terms. The instructions we established allowed for

selecting multiple labels in an attempt to provide more specific information about

the content of the game. However, this did not solve the issue of label ambiguity,

and it introduced another problem: how to order the different genre labels in a

meaningful way. Examining the genre labels also made us realize that the genre

element is not strictly about the gameplay or style--it is overloaded with a range of

different types of information. In order to tease out these subtleties we

recommend creating a faceted scheme for video game genres. Facet analysis is the

process of examining a subject field and dividing it into fundamental categories,

each of which represents an essential characteristic of division of the subject field

(Spiteri, 1997). Some of the dimensions we identified so far include gameplay

(e.g., action, RPG, strategy), style (e.g., platformer, MMORPG, tower defense),

the purpose of games (e.g., educational, party), target audience (e.g. adult, early

childhood), presentation (e.g, 2D, anime/manga), temporal aspect (e.g., real-time,

turn-based strategies), point of view (e.g., first-person, third-person), theme (e.g.,

fantasy, sci-fi), mood/affect (e.g., horror, mystery), setting (e.g., futuristic, space),

and so on. We believe that by harnessing these particular characteristics, we will

be able to develop systems that reveal or suggest similar games with significantly

improved results. For instance, using this faceted scheme, the genre facets of a

game such as Final Fantasy XIII can be described as follows:

Gameplay (RPG); Style (Action RPG); Purpose (Entertainment); Target

audience (Teen – ESRB); Presentation (3D); Point of view (Third-person);

Theme (Fantasy); Mood/Affect (Mystery; Inspirational); Setting

(Futuristic); Temporal aspect (Real-time); Type of ending (Circuitous);

Visual style (Photorealism – Illusionism)

Future work will report further on this development.

5.4. Other Issues: Names, Versions, Series, and Platforms

There were several other issues in describing video games. The naming of the

games was one of them. Sometimes there are mismatching titles and numbering of

games that are released in multiple regions (e.g., Biohazard in Japan was released

in North America as Resident Evil; Puzzle Bobble in Japan was based on the

arcade game Bubble Bobble and was released in North America and Europe as

Bust-a-Move; Final Fantasy IV in Japan was released in North America as Final

Fantasy II), and there is also an issue of multiple titles and other names by which

the game is known (e.g., The Legend of Zelda vs. Zelda; Super Mario Bros. vs.

Mario). When the old game is ported into a new platform it can be given a

different name (e.g. Tales of Graces F released for Playstation 3 in North America

vs. Tales of Graces released for Wii in Japan). Denoting the actual difference

among different versions/editions of the games (e.g., Special, Classic, Limited,

Collector’s, Deluxe, Super, Premium, Gold, Platinum) can also be challenging

without conducting additional research on each item. Sometimes the same games

are packaged and sold differently in multiple ways (e.g., God of War Saga

Collection vs. God of War: Collection vs. God of War: Origins Collection). We

are currently discussing different options for dealing with this naming problem

such as employing attributes or specifying the relationship types among different

titles.

Determining the series information can also be difficult. Sometimes the

numbering after the title can help, but the first published game of the series of

course does not typically have any numbering associated with it. For other games

within a series, there is no numbering that can directly connect the games (e.g.,

Katamari Damacy, We Love Katamari, Katamari Forever, Beautiful Katamari).

Some games belong to multiple series: for example, Persona 4 belongs to Shin

Megami Tensei series (Parent) as well as Persona series (Child), and Tales games

have various titles belonging to the main series (e.g., Tales of Vesperia, Tales of

Symphonia) as well as the spinoff series (e.g., Tales of the Tempest, Tales of VS.).

There is also the issue of the coherence of a series. Some games make up a series

because there is actually a continuation of the story that is told across multiple

games (e.g., Halo series) whereas others are not connected in any way story-wise,

but do share a similar theme or gameplay format and thus constitute a series (e.g.,

Final Fantasy series). To make things even more complicated, there are examples

such as Shadow Hearts series – Shadow Hearts: Covenant (the second game in

the series) is a continuation of the story told in Shadow Hearts (the first game),

but Shadow Hearts: From the New World (the third game) is a completely new

story featuring a similar gameplay format and battle system as the previous

games. Also some spinoff series feature particular species or characters from

another series (e.g., Chocobo Racing featuring chocobos from Final Fantasy

series), therefore they are not connected directly with regards to the story, theme,

or general gameplay format of the original series. Determining all this information

related to series will require significant amount of time researching the

background information of each game for the cataloger. We are considering the

separation of elements Series and Franchise, or adopting another element called

Universe to represent these different types of series.

Additionally, the concept of platform can be confusing to some users as the

software and hardware needed to play the game are completely integrated for

some consoles (e.g., Sony Playstation) but in other cases, they are separate (e.g.,

games developed for iOS can be play used in any devices that runs iOS including

iPad, iPhone, etc.).

6. Conclusion and Future Work

The efforts described in this paper were a first step in creating a formal metadata

schema for describing video games and interactive media. Through the process of

exploring personas and use scenarios, selecting metadata elements, and cataloging

actual games based on those elements, we encountered several challenges, some

of which are unique due to the nature of video games. These challenges confirm

the importance of having a standardized way of describing games including

definitions of metadata elements, instructions for description, and controlled

vocabularies, as well as conceptualizing a new model, specific to the video game

domain. We plan to further develop our schema by continuing the following

efforts: 1) extending the CORE set of elements by selecting and defining a larger

“recommended” set that can potentially be useful for users of video games, and 2)

developing controlled vocabularies for particular elements such as genre,

publisher, etc. This second version of the schema will not only contain a larger

number of metadata elements, but also incorporate hierarchical and faceted

structures for some of the elements (e.g., genre, plots, visual style). Additionally,

we are conducting a series of systematic user studies involving in-depth

interviews in order to discover which information elements are perceived as

useful and necessary for end-users such as gamers or parents of young gamers.

The information we obtain from these interviews will further help us verify the

importance of including particular metadata elements as well as improve the

definitions and instructions provided for each element. After the completion of the

recommended set in addition to the CORE16, we plan to do a more extensive

evaluation of these schemas by creating a database of metadata records for a

sample game collection and conducting a usability test of this database. All of

these efforts will ideally move us closer to understanding the universe of games

more fully, and potentially lead us to new domain-specific conceptual models that

more accurately reflect and represent this space. We believe that our end results

will be useful for any game related organization: not only libraries, archives, and

museums with video games in their collections, but also commercial enterprises

like game developers, manufacturers, and distributors.

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the class participants of INFX 598 Video Game

Metadata and especially Andrew Perti at the SIMM for their valuable contributions to the project.

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Appendix

I. Five Personas and Use Scenarios

 Player persona

Name: Jeffrey Cunningham

Occupation: Junior High Student

Gender: Male

Education: As a junior high student, Jeffrey excels in art, wood shop, and typing

classes. He plays basketball on the JV team.

Computing and Web experience: Owned his first laptop computer at age 10.

Although he’s not into programming, he does have considerable Web 2.0 skills.

He regularly updates two separate blogs, participates in fantasy football and

baseball leagues, and has 1432 friends on Facebook. Plays lots of online video

games.

Personal Web behavior patterns: Likes to browse game web sites. Has special

affinity for gamefaqs.com and gamerankings.com. Uses these sites mostly to

inform video game purchases and obtain gameplay information.

How they will use the site: Jeffrey comes to thesimm.org mostly as a recreational

activity. He enjoys the ability to view hi-resolution box art for his favorite games.

He also browses the tiff files of classic game magazines. Recently he has taken an

interest in researching the histories of local gaming companies he might one day

apply to.

Any additional site-specific demographics: Jeffrey can’t wait to get an iPad in

order to peruse game magazines on the go.

 Parent Persona

Name: Marcia Strom

Occupation: Classroom Assistant

Gender: Female

Education: BA in Psychology

Computing and Web experience: Primarily uses a desktop at home for email.

Will browse the web to shop on occasion and is a whiz at using travel sites to find

good airplane fares.

Personal Web behavior patterns: Marcia does not use a large variety of

websites. Once she is comfortable with a certain interface it takes a lot to pull her

away to another one. She found out about thesimm.org through her son who went

on a field trip to the SIMM.

How they will use the site: Once Marcia’s son Joey showed her thesimm.org, she

immediately saw a link connecting the exhibit Joey saw on video game music

design to Super Mario Brothers 3, a game she played while in college. Once the

floodgates to Nostalgia Land opened, Marcia spends free time watching gameplay

videos and listening to music files of the games she played with her dad as a

young girl.

Any additional site-specific demographics: Marcia has 3 children and plans on

taking them to the SIMM to see the exhibits in person.

 Nostalgia/Collector Persona

Name: Sam Schneider

Occupation: Copywriter for Amazon.com

Gender: Male

Education: BA in Communications

Computing and Web experience: Very web savvy, especially Web 2.0. Has

designer friends and colleagues and he definitely “speaks the language.”

Personal Web behavior patterns: Uses a tablet for most of his non-writing

computing needs. Keeps tabs on his world with heavy use of RSS feeds. Facebook

lurker.

How they will use the site: Sam is a true game geek and spends a fair amount of

time browsing numerous game sites. He has recently adopted thesimm.org as his

go-to site for information on classic video games. He surfs here because the

associative interface keeps attracting his attention to items he has not seen in

years. These include gameplay videos, screenshots, and hi-resolution promotional

art he loved when he was younger.

Any additional site-specific demographics: Gamer with wife and kids, but lots

of expendable income. He has a man den that includes current generation systems

and a few classic ones too.

 Academic/Scholar Persona

Name: Dr. Clancy P. Russell

Occupation: Economics professor

Gender: Male

Education: PhD in Social Economics

Computing and Web experience: Is seasoned when it comes to internet research

in library databases. Has good luck with Google. Does not create much on the

web; he mostly has his teaching assistants create his web content.

Personal Web behavior patterns: Dr. Russell is very old-school when it comes

to using the internet. He is skilled at searching library databases but needs

assistance from library staff to hone in on and find some articles. He keeps two

email accounts: one on Yahoo! and the other at the university. The only web news

he sees in on the Yahoo! front page.

How they will use the site: Dr. Russell is teaching a class in social economics.

One of his modules will focus on the phenomenon of microtransactions on the

Xbox Live Marketplace and the Playstation Network. He uses thesimm.org in

order to find links to the most current research and scholarship regarding both the

games chosen for the study, and microtransactions in general. He uses the creator

information to contact the producers of the games in hopes of setting up a webinar

for his students.

Any additional site-specific demographics: Dr. Russell does not do a lot of

research on video games outside of library databases, so he chose thesimm.org

because he is confident the information is both accurate and presented clearly.

 Game Developer/Designer Persona

Name: Debra Gurvitz

Occupation: Game Designer

Gender: Female

Education: BS Computer Science

Computing and Web experience: Expert

Personal Web behavior patterns: Surfer, Publisher, and Critic

How they will use the site: Debra is constantly looking for new ideas for games

based on themes, mood, and characters of older games. She is also always

interested in trivia related to games so she can try to design with that in mind.

Any additional site-specific demographics: Debra knows the thesimm.org is a

robust database where she can find arcane bits and pieces to put into her designs.

She also knows she can look at a wide range of games displayed by different

criteria. This allows her to make accurate references to past games in the new

ones she creates.

 Curator/Librarian Persona

Name: Nancy Henderson

Occupation: Academic Librarian

Gender: Female

Education: MS Library and Information Science

Computing and Web experience: Nancy is quite tech-savvy and always up-to-

date on new IT devices and applications.

Personal Web behavior patterns: As a librarian, she is extremely skilled at

searching library databases and the Web for any type of information. She also

spends a lot of time on the Web, and especially on social media websites.

How they will use the site: At Nancy’s library, they have decided to build a

video game collection for students as well as scholars who are interested in game

research. She uses thesimm.org in order to learn more about how games are

organized, and get inspired on how she can organize the games in their new

collection as well.

Any additional site-specific demographics: She is not a gamer herself, so she

has to look up information on video games on various website in order to help

plan the game related library events and programs.

II. Games Used for Testing

Table 3. Games used for testing the metadata schema