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The Computer Games Journal
Published in: The Computer Games Journal 4/2020

24-10-2020 | Research

Video Game Genres and Advancing Quantitative Video Game Research with the Genre Diversity Score

Authors: Rebecca Sevin, Whitney DeCamp

Published in: The Computer Games Journal | Issue 4/2020

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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.
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
The difference in free-time is an important consideration here because of the cross-sectional nature of this study. The measures used refer to current video game use, but cumulative lifetime use would also be relevant in how video game exposure might affect various outcomes, and that might not be reflected in current use. Additionally, there may be other purposes for which an enthusiasm-focused measure is more appropriate (i.e., an investigation of the effects of interest or attitudes rather than actual exposure).
 
2
A separate set of analyses (not shown, but available upon request) used the same models as in Tables 2–4, but with the ideal scores and ideal hours substituted in for the original measures. In them, ideal genre diversity is consistently the strongest predictor across the models, but the amount of explained variance is slightly lower than in the original models. This suggests that the ideal measure is no better than the actual measure and additionally, ideal hours per week is a significant predictor even after controlling for other measures in these models, but remains relatively weak in comparison to genre diversity and using a PC, suggesting again that it is not a suitable measure by itself.
 
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Metadata
Title
Video Game Genres and Advancing Quantitative Video Game Research with the Genre Diversity Score
Authors
Rebecca Sevin
Whitney DeCamp
Publication date
24-10-2020
Publisher
Springer New York
Published in
The Computer Games Journal / Issue 4/2020
Electronic ISSN: 2052-773X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40869-020-00115-3

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