Saturday, April 27, 2024

Video game authorship for Libraries

 Smith, Eric


Cho, H., Hubbles, C. and Moulaison-Sandy, H. (2022), "Individuals responsible for video games: an exploration of cataloging practice, user need and authorship theory", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 78 No. 6, pp. 1420-1436. http://search.proquest.com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/scholarly-journals/individuals-responsible-video-games-exploration/docview/2720241279/se-2?accountid=10361

    For my 5th assignment, I chose to look at research articles regarding video games in the library. I began to explore both how they are used in programs and how they are used in the collection. However, since this is a class about collection development, I wanted to focus on that topic first and foremost. Through my research on the subject I came across an interesting article about video games and collections that I wanted to share with the class. The topic of the article is about authorship theory in regards to video games. As an avid video game play, I can attest to the normal ways we categorize video games. Titles are the most common way to organize video games, but we also use the date of release as well as the genre. In most cases, the company that published the game is one of the most well know aspects of how to categorize a video game. Sonic is made by Sega, Street fighter is made by Capcom, Mario by Nintendo, etc. This is a very unique aspect of video games that has just been accepted for the past several decades of video games' existence. This article begins by questioning this practice and seeks to define what a creator would be for video games. This is particularly challenging due to the fact that most video games area created by a large collection of people. 

    In the context of libraries, the metadata involving the authorship of an item is very important for classification. Currently, most libraries use the established method of authorship, crediting companies. Even Worldcat uses this standard. While it make sense from the perspective of the company commissioning a work, it is still important to note the actual humans that worked on the piece of media. One argument has been to classify video games just as one would classify a movie. However, this issue with this stems from the lack of uniformity of jobs in the video game space. For a game like Devil May Cry, you might include in the metadata the "combat lead" because that person was important to the game. But if you play a puzzle game without any combat, whose name do you put in the "combat lead" category. This is why I find this article to be so interesting, to deals with this conundrum, how it's been tackled in the past and suggestions for the future. 

    To begin, the article defines authors and auteurs. Authors are those directly responsible for a work. With books, and even some specific indie games, this is very clear and obvious. Auteurship starts to come into play when more people work on a piece of media. An auteur is defined as a single person who's decisions shaped the work. With a lot of movies, the director is credited as being the auteur behind a film. This phenomenon is already present in the video games industry. Auteurs such as Shigero Miyamoto (Mario) and Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear) as examples of this. As useful as this method of authorship is, it also does still discount all of the other creatives that worked on the same games. 

    Ultimately, a user should be able to find, identify, select, obtain, and explore the video games they are looking for at the library. The authors of the article gave some suggestions to ensure that they are able to do this, regardless of the complexities of cataloging a video game. For one, further research should be developed to understand the commonalities between video production studios and what jobs commonly appear. Developing a controlled vocabulary for this would be helpful. Additionally, there should be a focus on looking at user generated data for video games and seeing how they do it. Wikipedia currently has a system that identifies programmers, artists, directors, composers, etc.  The website, Mobygames.com acts as a sort of IMDB for video games and has an abundance of standard parameters that they use.

I find this to be a very interesting conundrum. I'm a massive fan of the medium and I love to see further acceptance of it. From day 1 I've been an advocate for adding them to the collection and I'm happy to see more research and discussion surrounding it. 

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