The Need for Recategorized Video Game Labels: A Quantitative Approach

Prior research has suggested that video game genre labels are an ineffective method of communicating a game\u27s experience. Our investigation serves to provide a quantitative means of assessing experience communication effectiveness. We assessed game similarities by their associated game genre labels. The ratio between the small number of available developer-generated labels and the number of games led to too few labels to effectively delineate between similar and dissimilar games. The ratio between the large number of user-generated labels and the number of games led to too many labels to effectively cluster similar games with one another. However, games that had matching genres (e.g., direct sequels to each other) led to direct clustering. The result from this analysis provides evidence that this novel method of assessing games\u27 communication experience works as intended and may be used by future research to assess the effectiveness of alternative categorization systems