User-centered approach in creating a metadata schema for video games and interactive media

Abstract

Video games and interactive media are increasingly becoming important part of our culture and everyday life, and subsequently, of archival and digital library collections. However, existing organizational systems often use vague or inconsistent terms to describe video games or attempt to use schemas designed for textual bibliographic resources. Our research aims to create a standardized metadata schema and encoding scheme that provides an intelligent and comprehensive way to represent video games. We conducted interviews with 24 gamers, focusing on their video game-related information needs and seeking behaviors. We also performed a domain analysis of current organizational systems used in catalog records and popular game websites, evaluating metadata elements used to describe games. With these results in mind, we created a list of elements which form a metadata schema for describing video games, with both a core set of 16 elements and an extended set of 46 elements providing more flexibility in expressing the nature of a game.