Themes in videogame research : a content analysis of scholarly articles

Abstract

In trying to provide access to videogame materials for scholars, collecting organizations must build standards for building and structuring collections, and in turn information professionals must assess the information needs of users. In order to begin the assessment, this paper presents a content analysis of scholarly videogame articles. The results of the analysis will provide the basis for structuring videogame archives, libraries, or databases. Metadata schemas are important to access, and to collecting. That metadata will aid patrons is widely accepted, but too often schemas and vocabularies are based on only experts’ opinions without taking into account patrons’ ideas of what is important. To address this dearth, the content analysis presented in this paper combines historical ideas of metadata standards from expert archivists with an analysis of what themes are important, common, and sought for in the literature of videogame scholars, who are the likely users of videogame collections.