Video Game Information Needs And Game Organization: Differences By Sex And Age

Introduction. Video games are increasingly recognized as important consumer products, literacy and learning tools, and objects of scholarly research. This study aims to explore video game information needs and game organization behaviour of users, especially focusing on understanding differences by sex and age. This is important for designing useful video game information retrieval and recommendation systems.Method. A large-scale survey of game players and other stakeholders interested in video games was conducted by the research team. The survey asked about their gaming experience, information seeking, and game collecting and organization behaviour.Analysis. Responses were tabulated and descriptive statistics are reported. Chi-squaredgoodness-of-fit tests were also performed in order to determine whether the discrepancies between sexes and age groups were statistically significant.Results. The survey results are presented, focusing on how users organize their game collections, what kinds of game information they value and from which information sources they seek such information. The differences based on sex and age group are also discussed.Conclusions. The findings suggest that users do exhibit different information needs and seek different game information resources to meet those needs based on their sex and age, implying the importance of developing game information systems flexible enough to serve a wide variety of game users.