Full Steam Ahead: A Conceptual Analysis of User-Supplied Tags on Steam

Abstract

This article describes a conceptual analysis of user-generated tags applied to video games in the Steam video game distribution system. The research team scraped all user-generated tags available on Steam and then conducted a conceptual analysis of the tags, sorting them into categories and comparing them to the current version of the Video Game Metadata Schema. This analysis allowed the team to identify new metadata elements and terms useful to game players. We present a discussion covering the major issues in organizing the terms, as well as the implications for the future work in the area of video game metadata.