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.
In this paper, we focus exclusively on video games; table-top, role-playing and other game types are not considered.
- 2.
Available at http://reddit.com, last visited September 4, 2018.
- 3.
Available at https://github.com/lucas-tulio/simple-reddit-crawler, last visited September 4, 2018.
- 4.
Agreement scores for all aspects are available at http://toinebogers.com/?page_id=779.
- 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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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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