Project
The Game and Metadata Citation Project (GAMECIP)

Project Directors
Christy Caldwell, University of California, Santa Cruz
Eric Kaltman, University of Alberta
Henry Lowood, Stanford University
Noah Wardrip-Fruin, University of California, Santa Cruz

Project URL
https://gamecip.soe.ucsc.edu

Project Reviewer
Joseph (Josie) Garza Medina, Independent Scholar

Project Overview

Eric Kaltman, Christy Caldwell, Henry Lowood, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin

The Game and Metadata Citation Project (GAMECIP) project aimed to clarify and expand the relationship between library descriptive practices for games and the citation and reference practices of game scholars. GAMECIP's team consisted of librarians and game studies researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) and Stanford University Libraries. The groups had previously collaborated on study of academic games funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)1 and then received a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services that funded the GAMECIP project from 2014-2018. The two primary goals of the project were to improve description, reference, and citation practices for games, and to forecast new ways that games could be referenced with emerging computational techniques. Librarians at UCSC and Stanford collaborated on the creation of controlled vocabularies for game platforms and media formats, metadata standards recommendations for library catalog entries, and guidance on item-level description aimed at library professionals. The GAMECIP controlled vocabularies were approved for use in catalog records by the Library of Congress,2 and the cataloging recommendations were published in collaboration with the Online Audiovisual Catalogers (OLAC).3

The project team, led by the Expressive Intelligence Studio within the Computational Media department at UCSC, analyzed the form and implementation of game references within academic texts including bibliographies and "ludographies." They also proposed new methods for game discovery in library collections and new tools for citing internal game states. The former work consisted of a set of interactive natural language processing (NLP) models of a Wikipedia- and GameFAQs-derived corpus of game descriptive text. The resulting visualizations included GameSpace,4 a 3D visualization of the "space" of Wikipedia games that users could explore, as well as the GameNet5 and GameSage6 search tools that allowed users to input descriptions of games and find those that most matched their ideas. For citing internal game states and locations, the team developed the Game and Interactive Software Scholarship Toolkit (GISST) that made use of game emulators to allow for in-browser saving and loading of games at specific moments. This effectively allowed for a researcher to reference a particular location or item in a game and recall it within the text itself. An example of GISST was published in Digital Humanities Quarterly in 2021,7 and GISST is currently being funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for 2023-2024.

Research into game citation practices consisted of a large literature review of different forms of game citations, including a detailed analysis of the practices at work in the journal Game Studies. In addition to a lack of uniform game citation practices, it was also common to refer to particular games without explicit references. This pointed to a tendency within the game studies field of relying on an implicit, shared understanding of games that appeared to threaten the stability, over time, of academic references to games. The findings of this work were published in Game Studies in 20208 and helped further conversations among scholars and academic publishers for best practices and formal citation standards.

Project Review

Joseph (Josie) Garza Medina

The Game and Metadata Citation Project (GAMECIP) is an effort by researchers at the UC Santa Cruz Library and Stanford University Libraries to create metadata schema that can be used in the construction of digital game libraries, research projects, and papers. This effort at creating controlled vocabularies to describe, catalog, and cite digital video games has been utilized by such cataloging agencies as the Library of Congress in their cataloging records. Outside of their efforts at creating a base element set of game cataloging metadata, GAMECIP has four visualization and discovery tools for exploring game metadata: GameSpace, GameSage, GameNet, and GameGlobs. 

GameSpace is a three-dimensional visualization of the connections between 16,000 video games listed on Wikipedia that uses natural language processing algorithms to denote the hyperlink connections between the catalogued games’ Wiki articles. GameSage uses free-text user input to find and list games most like the game described in the user text input. GameNet is a hyperlink network that connects 12,000 games together by similarity, while also allowing the user to “jump across” the network to a game unlike the one they are perusing. GameGlobs is a two-dimensional visualization of games in clusters of similarity based aronound their metadata. Though these are all exciting visualization tools for game lovers and game scholars alike, the hyperlink for GameSpace on the GAMECIP website is unfortunately broken, and I had issues with individual game hyperlinks on GameGlobs. GameSage was interesting as a broad search tool, but GameNet showed strong potential as a way of mapping both similarities and dissimilarities between games. As someone who studies gender in games, I could see using GameNet to research games that are akin to one that has specifically gendered coding or themes, or to compare-and-contrast between dissimilar games and their depictions of gender. 

Adoption of the metadata schema by the Library of Congress is proof of GAMECIP’s quality as a quantitative project; though the list of papers published by GAMECIP’s production team has not been updated since 2016, the scholars involved have published and presented in multiple prestigious journals and at DiGRA, the main conference in the game studies field. While the GAMECIP website and its attendant visualization tools need maintenance, the project and its metadata standards are of continued and considerable use for the game studies community. As a game studies student and scholar, I plan to use the GAMECIP citation guidelines in future research, especially when producing digital projects and when citing elements of gameplay that fall outside the traditional purview of Modern Language Association (MLA) citation methods. One must also applaud project blogger Eric Kaltman’s technical report on the website for its easy-to-understand breakdown and examples of how to use the metadata schema in common text markup languages.