A preliminary network analysis on steam game tags: another way of understanding game genres

Video game genre classification has long been a focusing perspective in game studies domain. Despite the commonly acknowledged usefulness of genre classification, scholars in the game studies domain are yet to reach consensus on the game genre classification. On the other hand, Steam, a popular video game distribution platform, adopts the user-generated tag feature enabling players to describe and annotate video games based on their own understanding of genres. Despite the concern of the quality, the user-generated tags (game tags) provide an opportunity towards an alternative way of understanding video game genres based on the players' collective intelligence. Hence, in this study, we construct a network of game tags based on the co-occurrence of tags in games on Steam platform and analyze the structure of the network via centrality analysis and community detection. Such analysis shall provide an intuitive presentation on the distribution and connections of the game tags, which furthermore suggests a potential way of understanding the important tags that are commonly adopted and the main genres of video games.

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