New Video Game Taxonomy

Overview

Video games have come a long way since their creation decades ago--and yet when it comes to classification, the concepts and language being used are not too different from the categories used in the 90's: Action. Adventure. RPG. Strategy. Meanwhile, more and more titles are being put into these overly-broad categories, making it difficult for customers to find new titles that aren't backed by huge marketing pushes (especially when publishers submit their titles into multiple categories, making the existing options even more meaningless).

The purpose of this project is to create a new taxonomy for video game classification--including separating out things like visual perspective, number of players, setting, tone, and other qualities that people look for when they're shopping, and making each of them their own facet. The end result, it is hoped, will be a way to search for titles that will allow customers to "dial in" to the exact sort of game they want, in the process hopefully discovering new titles that they might otherwise have missed.

Project phases

Phase One (current phase): Identify and define facets, and build a taxonomy to cover them all

Phase Two: Create a catalog of content by tagging 1000 titles with metadata consistent with the taxonomy created in Phase Two (taking the opportunity to improve on said taxonomy once it faces real world application)

Phase Three: Create an online database to search the recently-created catalog.

Phase Four: Create an ingestion portal so users can add new entries to the catalog, expanding the utility of the database