Video Game Genres and Advancing Quantitative Video Game Research with the Genre Diversity Score
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Video Game Genres and Advancing Quantitative Video Game Research with the Genre Diversity Score Rebecca Sevin1 · Whitney DeCamp1 Received: 28 July 2020 / Accepted: 14 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Quantitative research on video games often reduces participants’ gaming experience to how much time they spend playing video games. Although appropriate in some instances, it often fails to capture aspects of the video game experience. Studies that only use time as a means of establishing expertise in gaming fail to capture how much a player is involved in different types of video storytelling, game rules and mechanics, social experiences online and/or offline, and many other aspects. Only using time as a measurement also introduces a bias against women, as they typically have less leisure time overall, reducing the time they might spend playing video games. The current study proposes and tests a novel measure for gauging participants’ experience with video games that includes their experience with various game genres in addition to time dedicated to playing games. The “genre diversity score” presented in this paper provides a better understanding of an individual’s experience with gaming as a whole while still providing a metric that can be used in quantitative research. To demonstrate the usefulness of this measure it is compared to measures of time spent playing, the use of a PC for gaming, and casual/non-casual gaming. The analyses indicate that the genre diversity score outperforms other gaming measures in various tests of predictive power making a case for it to be used in future quantitative or mixed methods studies on gaming. Keywords Quantitative · Methods · Survey methods · Genre · Computer science · Gaming
* Rebecca Sevin [email protected] Whitney DeCamp [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
The Computer Games Journal
1 Introduction Like all forms of media, video game content can vary drastically from one game to the next. Video games can range from charming farm simulations, such as Farmville or Stardew Valley, to elaborate role playing games (RPGs) with strong narratives, such as the Mass Effect series and Final Fantasy series, to experimental art games, such as Gris and Flower. Despite video game content varying significantly in terms of genre, narrative themes, and game mechanics, the idea of video games as being predominately violent, realistic first-person shooter (FPS) style games (e.g., Halo, Call of Duty) dominates the Western idea of video game content, particularity for those less acquainted with gaming (Markey and Ferguson 2017). The reality is that, much like books and movies, video games vary in content and audience, yet this is often overlooked in quantitative and experimental research on video games in favor of a focus purely on violent content (e.g., Anderson et al. 2010; Fergsuon 2015; Ferguson et al. 2015). Thea current study
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