A qualitative investigation of users' discovery, access, and organization of video games as information objects

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 behaviour, we conducted 56 semi-structured interviews with users who find, play, purchase, collect and recommend video games. Participants included gamers, parents, collectors, industry professionals, librarians, educators 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 based 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.