“Looking for an Amazing Game I Can Relax and Sink Hours into..”: A Study of Relevance Aspects in Video Game Discovery

With the rapid growth of the video game industry over the past decade, there has been a commensurate increase in research activity focused on a variety of aspects of video games. How people discover the video games they want to play and how they articulate these information needs is still largely unknown, however. A better understanding of video game-related information needs and what makes a game relevant to a user could aid in the design of more effective, domain-specific search engines. In this paper we take a first step towards such domain-specific understanding. We present an analysis of a random sample of 521 complex game requests posted on Reddit. A coding scheme was developed that captures the 41 different aspects of relevance and information needs expressed in these requests. We find that game requests contain an average of close to 5 different relevance aspects. Several of these relevance aspects are geared specifically to video games, while others are more general.