Video Game Taxonomy
VIDEO GAME TAXONOMY DEVELOPMENT
Interactive Media Taxonomist | June - August 2020
From Fall 2020 to Spring 2021, I worked as a researcher for the GAMER Group. The GAMER Group at the University of Washington explores new ideas and approaches for organizing and providing access to video games and interactive media, understanding user behavior related to video games, and using video games for informal learning.
I worked on two projects: testing their video game taxonomy for video game artifacts against the Steve Meretzky Papers at Stanford Libraries and coding qualitative research data on AR video games.
Video Game Taxonomy Project
My role as a taxonomist researcher was to test the video game artifact taxonomy and suggest edits and areas for expansion. I tested a few different artifact collections, the main one being the Steven Meretzky at Stanford Libraries. The Meretzky collection includes pieces relating to computer game design and interactive fiction history from 1978-2009. Information objects included video game software, business notes, legal documents, and more. By taking samples of each of the different types of information objects, test cataloging each item, and identifying areas of possible improvement for the metadata schema, I learned the importance of testing a taxonomy and was able to provide recommendation for added terms.
AR Games and Ethics Project
I was part of an ongoing research project surrounding the ethical issues in playing augmented reality (AR) games. Beginning with a qualitative codebook on a previous study of Pokemon GO data, an AR game, myself and a team of three other students looked at coding the data from Ingress, a game based on capturing portals in AR. We assessed the previous codebook, then proceeded to code the open-ended responses from an online survey on Ingress.