Article

Games and Culture

1-24
ª The Author(s) 2015
Establishing Video Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Game Genres Using DOI: 10.1177/1555412015601541
gac.sagepub.com

Data-Driven Modeling
and Product Databases

Ali Faisal1 and Mirva Peltoniemi2,3

Abstract
Establishing genres is the first step toward analyzing games and how the genre
landscape evolves over the years. We use data-driven modeling that distils genres
from textual descriptions of a large collection of games. We analyze the evolution of
game genres from 1979 till 2010. Our results indicate that until 1990, there have
been many genres competing for dominance, but thereafter sport-racing, strategy,
and action have become the most prevalent genres. Moreover, we find that games
vary to a great extent as to whether they belong mostly to one genre or to a
combination of several genres. We also compare the results of our data-driven
model with two product databases, Metacritic and Mobygames, and observe that
the classifications of games to different genres are substantially different, even
between product databases. We conclude with discussion on potential future
applications and how they may further our understanding of video game genres.

Keywords
game genre, data-driven modeling, Metacritic, Mobygames, game corpus, topic
model, quantitative

1
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT, Department of Information and Computer Science
and Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland
2
Jyväskylä School of Business and Economics, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland
3
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

Corresponding Author:
Mirva Peltoniemi, Jyväskylä School of Business and Economics, University of Jyväskylä, Seminaarinkatu 15,
40014 Jyväskylän yliopisto, Finland.
Email: mirva.peltoniemi@jyu.fi

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

2 Games and Culture

Introduction
In game studies, there is a growing interest in defining genres and constructing a
vocabulary for describing video games. However, most studies have either focused
on ludological versus aesthetic features in defining video game genres (Aarseth,
1997; Apperley, 2006) or are limited to analyzing a single genre or a single game,
consequently failing to generalize on the typical characteristics of genres in compar-
ison to each other (Clearwater, 2011; Klevjer, 2005). Such a focus on individual
games or individual genres has led to a situation where there are no established ways
to assign genres to a large corpus of games. The solutions to many important
research questions hinge on this omission: How does the genre landscape evolve?
Which genres are most prevalent and which ones are disappearing? Which years
or decades have been most productive in terms of genre innovation? The present arti-
cle aims to introduce a novel method for automatic genre analysis that enables the
treatment of thousands of games and hence offers a comprehensive view to the
development of the genre landscape.
This article proposes a data-driven modeling approach for a large collection of
games with the goal of creating a rich description of the changes in the genre land-
scape and determining each game’s genre profile. Data-driven modeling was chosen
because it allows the genre structure to arise from the data ‘‘bottom-up,’’ rather than
being imposed from above, and can analyze a vast quantity of data consistently
which would not be easily possible manually. This radical departure from traditional
genre analysis allows us to discern content topics (i.e., genres) automatically and
provides an efficient and fast approach to analyze a large collection of games. More-
over, we allow the model to decide the number of topics present in the data each year
which means that the genre classification is not stable; the emergence of new genres
and the disappearance of old ones is possible over the years. Our results indicate that
the bulk of genre innovation took place in the 1980s and since then, the genre land-
scape has been dominated by sport-racing, strategy, and action games. The results
also reveal that games vary to a great extent as to how crisp their genre membership
is: some games belong mostly to a single genre while others belong equally to sev-
eral genres.
The proposed data-driven approach belongs to a machine learning model family,
called topic models (Blei, Ng, & Jordan, 2003; Griffiths & Steyvers, 2004). Specif-
ically, we use a recently developed topic modeling approach (Faisal, Gillberg, Leen,
& Peltonen, 2013) in assigning genre to video games. We compare the results of the
topic model to those achieved by retrieving genre data from public databases. The
latter approach has been popular in sociological studies where there has been the
need to assign genre to a large set of films (e.g., Hsu, Hannan, & Polos, 2011; Hsu,
Kocak, & Hannan, 2009). These two methods offer different ways to assign genre to
games. The topic model distils topics from a huge collection of games, where each
game is described using a short synopsis written by avid gamers.1 Here the term
topic is used as a synonym for a genre. A topic in a topic model can be described

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

Faisal and Peltoniemi 3

as a theme that consists of a collection of words that tend to appear together and
takes into account all words independent of whether they describe player actions,
rules, goals, or aesthetics. Hence, these capture game characteristics included in the
texts irrespective of whether they are interactive or representational. The second
alternative relies on the classification made by the database users and administrators.
Although these classifications are readily available, the different sources may clas-
sify titles differently which forces the researcher to find ways to moderate the
inconsistencies.
As topic models are data-driven methods, the quality of their results is dependent
on the input data, that is, the accuracy of the game synopses created by avid gamers.
The synopses are produced in a wiki-based manner which means that the authors
may have chosen to cover games that they feel strongly about and there may also
have been a considerable time lag between game experience and writing the synop-
sis. However, the strength of the wiki-based system is that blatant inaccuracies are
likely to be corrected by other users. In any case, the synopses may contain subjec-
tive experiences and opinions concerning the games. We see the synopses as gaming
discourse that is based on the authors’ game experience, since, as genre theorists
argue, genres are born from a variety of critical and popular discursive practices
(cf. Altman, 1999; Clearwater, 2011). A major advantage of the topic model family
is its ability to handle a vast amount of data consistently and efficiently, which may
not be possible manually. The model family cannot make a distinction between
interactive and representational characteristics. However, being neutral to the dis-
tinction may turn out to be a strength of the method because it forces researchers
to see each genre as a dimension of its own that may be present in every game to
an extent ranging from 0 to 100%. A game belonging to a particular genre to the
extent of 100% would be a prototype of the genre in question. However, in reality,
games tend to blend several genres to a varying extent. Therefore, the degrees of
membership in each genre can be seen as dimensions in a game’s genre profile. For
example, a game can belong to the action genre to the extent of 50%, to the strategy
genre to the extent of 40%, and the remaining 10% can be divided among various
other genres.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows. The next section reviews
different approaches to define game genres. This is followed by a short description
of the proposed methods and the data set used in this study. The subsequent section
describes the results achieved via these methods. The final section presents discus-
sion and concludes the article.

Related Work on Game Genres

Writings on video game genres tend to focus on two claims: (1) that game genres
should take into account ludological and not just aesthetic or narrative characteris-
tics of games and (2) that game genres should not be directly adopted from other
media forms, such as film or literature. Apperley (2006) argues that conventional

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

4 Games and Culture

video game genres rely too heavily on the representational characteristics, that is, the
visual aesthetics, of the games. He states that in order to create a vocabulary for dis-
cussing games, the nonrepresentational and interactive characteristics of games
should be given center stage. In this way, similarities that are located deeper than
representation could be discovered. Apperley states that this overreliance on aes-
thetics stems from adopting genre labels from prior media forms.2 For ludologists,
interactivity and simulation distinguish video games from other types of communi-
cation that rely on stories, characters, and themes (Clearwater, 2011). Therefore,
video game genres should be based on rules, goals, and outcomes.
Many game researchers, however, take a more lenient stance and identify inter-
active elements and aesthetic elements as different dimensions of the genre land-
scape. For King and Krzywinska (2006), gameplay context consist of narrative
and genre. The narrative dimension is not usually interactive, as the plot structure
of the game cannot be changed by player action. The genre dimension, on the other
hand, provides motivation for player actions and can influence gameplay options.
Arsenault (2009) and Apperley (2006) both root for genre taxonomies that comprise
interactive genres and thematic or iconographic genres and allow multiple-genre
membership. In this way, games may be classified into one group based on gameplay
and into another based on iconography or story.3 Clearwater (2011), however,
emphasizes that gameplay and iconography cannot be completely separated. He
states that it may be useful to do so for analytical purposes but that such a separation
is artificial.
At the moment, we do not know much about the benefits or drawbacks of one or
multidimensional genre categorization because so far empirical research on video
game genres has concentrated on single genres or even on single games. Klevjer
(2005) points out that there is very little research that would generalize on the typical
characteristics of game categories in comparison to each other. A look at recent tex-
tual and empirical research on video game genres confirms this assertion: The bulk
of the studies concentrate on analyzing a single genre (e.g., Black, 2012; Carter,
Gibbs, & Harrop, 2014; Chess, 2014; Gillespie & Crouse, 2012; Goetz, 2012;
Hitchens, Patrickson, & Young, 2014; Lennon, 2010; MacCallum-Stewart,
2010; Paavilainen, Hamari, Stenros, & Kinnunen, 2013; Patterson, 2014; Thin,
Hansen, & McEachen, 2011). Therefore, this body of work has not so far taken
on the task of finding ways to assign genre to a large corpus of games but has con-
centrated on analyzing games typical to each genre more or less in isolation.
Additional challenges to the above-mentioned task come from different audi-
ences using genre terminology differently and from genre innovation. Studios, retai-
lers, critics, journalists, designers, and fans may use genre terminology in different
ways, but they also interact with each other (Clearwater, 2011). Furthermore, Mäyrä
(2008) points out that the genre system is in constant flux, as new influential games
with certain combinations of features create pressure to establish a new genre. The
audience expects the stability of genres to be tempered by innovation, either techni-
cal or stylistic (Apperley, 2006). Such innovation can come about in the form of

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

Faisal and Peltoniemi 5

multigenre games that use the conventions of several genres (Harper, 2011) or in the
form of new genres that combine elements from existing genres and may attract new
consumers to the game market (MacCallum-Stewart, 2010). Moreover, games vary
as to how closely they align with a genre definition leading to core and peripheral
games in relation to the genre (cf. Voorhees, 2009).
The origins of new game genres have not been extensively studied, but in film
studies it has been found that new genre labels are originated by critics (Altman,
1999). Film studios have the incentive to emphasize the uniqueness of their product
and to attract a wide audience. Assigning the product into a genre could make the
audience see other films in that group as substitutes and it might also alienate a part
of the audience. Critics, on the other hand, have the incentive of placing the film in
relation to other similar films in order to provide information for the audience.
Although genres may be in a way created by critics, innovations leading to the birth
of a new genre come from the producers. Altman (1999) describes a cycle-genre sys-
tem, whereby a studio creates a stream of a new kind of successful films (i.e., cycle)
that are constructed by critics to form a new genre and this genre then spreads to the
industry as a whole leading to copycat films by other studios. All such cycles, how-
ever, do not lead into the birth of a new genre. Although this model is based on the
workings of the film industry, it appears to be suitable—to some degree at least—for
analyzing the birth of game genres. A popular example of such a dynamic is the
release of Doom and its sequels and the birth of the first-person shooter genre
(cf. Arsenault, 2009).
Despite the constant change in the genre landscape, many static game genre
classifications exist in books, reports, research articles, and online databases (see
Table 1). There appears to be a consensus on the existence of action, shooting,
role-playing game, strategy, simulation, sports, racing and fighting genres. How-
ever, the variation among these classifications is considerable and the terms are not
well established. It is important to notice that in addition to genre labels, there is
considerable variation in the number of genres these sources identify.4 Another
difference between the classifications concerns multiple-genre membership.
Gamerankings.com and mobygames.org allow multiple-genre membership, that
is, more than one main genre can be assigned to a game. Metacritic.com allows
only a single genre to be assigned to a game.
Based on this review, we note that the genre literature lacks a method that applies
the multidimensional genre system formulated by King and Krzywinska (2006),
Arsenault (2009), Apperley (2006), and Clearwater (2011) to a large corpus of
games in a consistent manner. This means that we are unable to systematically ana-
lyze changes in the genre landscape in terms of genre innovation and changes in the
dominance of different genres. In order to understand the long-term evolution of the
video game domain, it is critical that we can organize games into groups based on
both representational and interactive elements. The organization should be data-
driven, based on relative characteristics of the games, and not be imposed based
on manual classifications. In order to find a classification system corresponding to

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

 6
Table 1. Comparison of Genre Classifications.
Shooter /
Shoot-’ Other Family Children’s Virtual
Adventure Action FPS em-up Shooters RPG Strategy RTS MMORPG Simulation God Sports Racing Fighting Platform Puzzle Music ent. ent. life Flight Arcade Casual Other

Tschang (2007)         
Entertainment Software              
Association (2014)
Poole (2000)         
Hayes and Dinsey         
(1995)
Gamerankings.com         
Mobygames        

Note. RPG ¼ role-playing game; RTS ¼ real-time strategy; MMORPG ¼ massively multiplayer online role-playing game; FPS ¼ first-person shooter.

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

Faisal and Peltoniemi 7

these specifications, we compare two methods, data-driven modeling and product

databases, in assigning genre to a large corpus of video games.

Data and Method

Game Data Sets
We use two data sets to illustrate our methods. Mobygames.com is a wiki-based
database of video games published since 1979 (a total of 33,397 games) and has been
previously used in academic research (see e.g., Balland, De Vaan, & Boschma, 2013;
Mollick, 2012). In this database, genre is assigned through the consensus of the con-
tributors. Metacritic.com relies on genre classifications provided by game publish-
ers, and hence these two sources offer conflicting data on genre classification
concerning many games.
Our sample includes games published on major consoles during 1979–2010. We
define major consoles to include Atari 2600, Channel F, ColecoVision, Game-
Cube, Genesis, Intellivision, Jaguar, Neo-Geo, Neo-Geo CD, NES, Nintendo 64,
Odyssey, Odyssey 2, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Sega 32x, Sega
CD, Sega Dreamcast, Sega Master System, Sega Saturn, SNES, TurboGrafx-16,
TurboGrafx-CD, Wii, Xbox, and Xbox 360. This results in data sets of 10,309
games from Mobygames classified into 8 genres and 4,991 games from Metacritic
classified into 36 genres (Metacritic database starts from 1996 and hence the sam-
ple is smaller).

Topic Models
Topic models are unsupervised machine learning models suitable to extract hidden
topics discussed in a collection of documents. Each document is represented by the
text it contains. We use the documents describing the games (here referred to as
‘‘game synopses’’) from Mobygames that are written by volunteer contributors. The
game synopses were cleaned through established text-mining methods (detailed
description in Appendix).
The topic models are able to distil topics from the text of the documents by learn-
ing the descriptive statistics concerning their content. In the classical topic models,
these statistics refer to (a) the probability of different words for each topic and
(b) probability of different topics for each document. These statistics can help a
researcher to understand the hidden topic structure of the documents. This means
that the model can compress the content of a large corpus to show topics and their
prevalence.5 This compression is performed by an algorithm that learns as it handles
the data. The algorithm adjusts itself, as it continues to explore the content of the
documents and ends up with a topic structure that best fits the given data set (for
introduction to machine learning see Alpaydin, 2014; Bishop, 2006).
The classical topic model, also referred to as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA;
Blei et al., 2003; Griffiths & Steyvers, 2004) is the simplest topic model. The

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

8 Games and Culture

intuition behind the classical LDA is that documents contain a mixture of multiple
topics. Classical LDA requires the researcher to specify the total number of active
topics in the entire document collection before the actual analysis. We use our
recently developed nonparametric extension of the model (LDA; Faisal et al.,
2013), where the total number of topics is learned automatically from the data,
avoiding the requirement for the user to specify the total number of topics (or gen-
res) before the analysis. This implies that the number of genres also arises from the
data rather than having a researcher to decide it. We provide a brief description of
the LDA model in the Appendix. Here we illustrate how the LDA model uncovers
hidden topic (or genre) structure by considering its results on an example game
synopsis for the game Eternal Sonata 2008, a typical role-playing video game. Fig-
ure 1 shows the synopsis of the game where we have highlighted different words
that the LDA model assigns to the top three topics. These are words about the topic
action (highlighted in blue) such as fight, combat and action, words about strategy
(highlighted in red) such as move, time, and battlefield, and words about sport-
racing (highlighted in green) such as character, world, and real time. Knowing that
this game blends the three topics; ‘‘strategy,’’ ‘‘action,’’ and ‘‘sport-racing,’’ help
us situate it in the collection of other game synopses. Given a collection of docu-
ments, the LDA models each document as a probability distribution over identified
topics. In the example synopsis, the distribution over topics places the highest
probabilities on strategy, action, and sport-racing (Figure 1; right). Note, the three
topics are not user defined, but rather each topic has a distribution over all words in
the vocabulary which is identified by the LDA model (we discuss this distribution
and Table 2 that shows corresponding top words for each topic in the Results
section).
LDA models can help game researchers in creating a useful genre system because
(1) the genres arise from the characteristics of the game population, (2) all charac-
teristics present in the textual data are taken into account and not limited based on
ludological or aesthetic preferences, (3) the number of genres is not limited and
hence new genres may be born and old ones may disappear over time, and (4) each
game can belong to several genres to a differing extent.

Comparison With Genre Assigned in Databases

To compare the results attained via the LDA model, we calculated the frequency of
each genre per year in Mobygames and Metacritic product databases. The results are
presented as the percentage of games launched in a year that are assigned to a par-
ticular genre.

Results
The LDA model finds 31 topics or genres in the overall collection of synopses in
games from 1979 to 2010. Table 2 lists the top 15 most probable words in each topic.

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

 The hero of Eternal Sonata is a real historical character, the famous 19-century Polish 0.3

composer Frederic Chopin. The game begins with Chopin lying on his deathbed and 0.25

0.2
having a strange dream in which he is transferred into a fantasy world where places
0.15
and people have musically sounding names. Chopin encounters a girl named Polka, a
0.1
magician who is on the run from her own desny (since all magicians die young in her
0.05
world). Other people join them on a quest to overthrow an evil nobleman. Events
0
Strategy Acon Sport-racing
from Chopin's real life are shown as parallels to what happens in his dream. The game

is conceived in the tradion of Japanese RPGs, with a linear, character-oriented story

line and graphics with animated influences. The gameplay combines several elements

of classic turn-based combat, strategy, and real-me fighng. Your party has a

limited amount of me for a turn, during which you can move a character over the

balefield and execute acons, which take different amount of me depending on

their effects. Light plays an important role during bales, since characters have

different aacks and spells when standing in the light or in a shadow. The game uses

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

works by Frederic Chopin as its musical score.

Figure 1. Illustrative example of topics extracted from a sample game. Synopsis of the game Eternal Sonata 2008 (developed by tri-Crescendo and
published by Namco Bandai Games) tagged according to topic assignment. The Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model first chooses a distribution over
topics (the histogram on the right, showing probabilities for the top three topics in the synopsis), then for each word chooses a topic assignment (the

9
colored words in the game synopsis). The topics and topic assignments in the figure are the result of the multitask LDA model fit from the actual data.
 Table 2. The 15 Most Frequent Words for Each Topic.

10
Topic Index

1. Platform enemi jump scroll platform ne side-scrol stage overhead brave vertic bar boi invinc stroke pinbal
2. — monkei Sam russian keyboard catapult ico coast string consum step express sync load slow-mot religi
3. Vehicle combat screen destroy lose top variat press ship fuel maze bottom laser catch faster joystick brick
4. — episod Dlc avatar zombi guybrush dant goo glow kinect commerci metroid alan telltal solut matt
5. — word answer correct black scan ghostbust survivor droid clone contain visual overlord event elv jail
6. — number Side hand mission path vari put donkei gap robot peopl insid center build straight
7. — point block goal make difficulti back button earn target amount crash long drop planet Rock
8. Transport plane Unit thrown elimin sea categori prove heart bird wrestl east grave zapper dead join
9. Shooting shoot shot comput avoid alien run energi enter fly throw stop door select bomb magic
10. Team plai Set team match creat mode fast version mean problem rule live japan friend clue
11. Japanese sne sailor sapo kabuki stimpi ackman xulã# batteri toad sparkster barnei bonker nobita felix yakumo
12. Space action space Gun fight extra similar item dark small combat give weapon rang asteroid attempt air
13. God level round end start oppon piec win castl collect area reach place color citi difficult
14. Monster search find monster view choos power wander navig forc lead boss dai pick hero hole fortress
15. Combat-sport move Time fire missil hit ball score turn left action minut ground life locat progress
16. control speed complet board origin gameplai type skill option fish king direct road order simul
17. Hardware wii download remot guitar nunchuk leaderboard ds hd ps3 retro mii burnout hasbro xbla wallac
18. Gambling includ object addit line featur classic special bet person singl card seri design multipl guid
19. Fighting battl defeat name kick perspect offens sega save adventur ninja power-up popular inhabit wizard cockpit
20. Action-racing race Car kong fighter disc hunt craft mario visibl challeng frog implement dock instal tire
21. Strategy race Time battl move control attack level version make complet set world unlock action take
22. Sport-racing mode charact includ seri plai team car stori origin world base abil track multiplay 3d
23. Action featur weapon fight power enemi gameplai special plai combat choos evil stage defeat fighter collect
24. Action-platform enemi point time plai level control destroi jump side shoot fire score earn Life back

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

25. Space level start hit button find ship select reach set begin top space land map bomb
26. Fantasy screen action boss direct planet dragon order locat take travel releas gameplai system choos shooter
27. Strategy-shooting charact world collect includ weapon make power end attack control abil fight stage Run skill
28. Hardware onlin xbox ps2 karaok usb eyetoi infect retail clank katamari revolut recon shrek north fisher
29. Secret codes mode challeng unlock bonu version stori member origin access titl edit dead specif releas black
30. Music sing â ’’ ps3 singstar song tracklist recognit octav puriti wiimot bull le piã+ata unreal pre-ord
31. Family event mission upgrad part experi content effect Famili pack live mous multiplay class role guid
Faisal and Peltoniemi 11

We use these top most probable words and assign a genre label to each topic (first
column of the table). Next, Figure 2 shows the evolution of most likely topics across
different years as provided by the LDA method. Up to 1990, there are many topics
competing for dominance, and there are frequent changes in which topic is the most
prevalent. Thereafter, three topics become dominant. The most prevalent is topic
number 22 which has mode, team, car, and track among its most probable words and
we label the topic as sport-racing. The second most prevalent topic, number 21,
includes words such as battle, attack, level, unlock, and world which lead us to label
it strategy. The third topic, number 23, includes weapon, fight, enemi,6 combat, and
defeat, and we label it action. In Table 2, the majority of the 31 topics have been
labeled with such descriptors.
There are also other topics that have been prevalent at some point but have lost
their standing. Topic 27 (labeled strategy-shooting) is about collecting, weapons,
power, attacking, and ability. Topic 26 (labeled fantasy) is about planets, dragons,
and travel. Topic 24 (labeled action-platform) deals with jumping, shooting, firing,
and scoring, and topic 25 (labeled space) with ships, maps, and space. In addition to
topics describing game content, there are two topics describing hardware. These can-
not be interpreted as genres, but they capture the hardware components included in
the games synopses.
Figures 3 and 4 drawn on the basis of Mobygames and Metacritic data reveal a
different picture of fluctuations in game content. In the Mobygames classification,
the majority of games is assigned to the action genre, while sports is the second most
prevalent category. In the Metacritic classification, no genre attains such prevalence,
and the dominance shifts between racing, action-adventure, and action genres but
for the most part not more than 20% of the games are assigned to any one genre.
In order to take a look at the micro-level differences in genre assignment between
the LDA model and the Mobygames genre labels, we have chosen five well-known
games for further analysis. These are Red Alert (1996), Harvest Moon (1997), Pro
Evolution Soccer 3 (2004), Drake’s Fortune (2007), and X-Men Legends (2004). For
each of these games, Figure 5 presents the distribution over the corresponding top
five topics in LDA (fantasy, space, action-platform, action, sport-racing, and strat-
egy) and the assigned genre in Mobygames. Of these five games, X-Men Legends
and Red Alert receive the highest probability for the action genre, Pro-Evolution
Soccer 3 and Drake’s Fortune have the highest probability for sport-racing, while
Harvest Moon gets the highest probability for strategy.
It is noteworthy that there is considerable variance in the probability distributions.
Although Pro Evolution Soccer 3 and Drake’s Fortune both have sport-racing as
their most dominant topic, for Pro Evolution Soccer 3 this dominance is much stron-
ger. While both games have action as the second most dominant topic, Drake’s
Fortune has that to a greater extent than Pro Evolution Soccer 3. Therefore, the clas-
sification created by the LDA model sees Pro Evolution Soccer 3 as more of a
sports-racing game than Drake’s Fortune, and Drake’s Fortune as more of an action
game than Pro Evolution Soccer 3. This indicates that the LDA model does not

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

 12
0.7

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

13 God 15 Combat-sport 16 --- 22 Sport-racing 23 Acon

25 Space 26 Fantasy 1 Plaorm 2 --- 3 Vehicle combat
4 --- 5 --- 6 --- 7 --- 8 Transport
9 Shoong 10 Team 11Japanese 12 Space acon 14 Monster search
17 Hardware 18 Gambling 19 Fighng 20 Acon-racing 21 Strategy

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

24 Acon-plaorm 27 Strategy-shoong 28 Hardware 29 Secret codes 30 Music
31 Family

Figure 2. Game topics and their probabilities (shown on y-axis) over time (shown on x-axis) in the sample based on the Latent Dirichlet
Allocation (LDA) model.
 0.9

0.8

0.7

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

0.1

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

Acon Adventure Educaonal Racing / Driving Role-Playing (RPG) Simulaon Sports Strategy

Figure 3. Games per genre in Mobygames (% of games per year).

13
 14
0.35

0.3

0.25

0.2

0.15

0.1

0.05

0
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

Acon Acon Adventure Adventure Games Alternave Sports Baseball

Basketball Car Combat Card Bale Games Combat Sims Compilaons
Fighng Games First-Person Shooters Football Futurisc Combat Sims Golf
Hockey Massively Mulplayer Miscellaneous Other Driving Games Other Shooters
Other Sports Games Other Strategy Games Parlor Games Party Games Plaormers
Puzzle Racing Real-Time Strategy Rhythm Games Role-Playing

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

Simulaons Soccer Taccal Shooters Turn-Based Strategy Videos
Virtual Life Games Wrestling

Figure 4. Games per genre in Metacritic (% of games per year).

Faisal and Peltoniemi 15

Figure 5. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) distribution over top topics and corresponding
Mobygames genres. All LDA topics that are at least 8% probable for any of the five games are
considered as top topics and plotted in the figure, while the Mobygames genres are listed
beside the game name in parentheses.

simply determine multiple-genre membership, but it can assign games to different

genres with varying degrees of dominance.
It is also noteworthy that there are differences between the games as to how
equally it is seen to belong to several genres. Pro Evolution Soccer 3 is dominated
by the sports-racing genre, whereas X-Men Legends has very similar probabilities for
action, strategy, sport-racing, and space topics. This indicates that the LDA model
sees some games as more closely following a single genre (crisper membership) and
others as a combination of multiple genres (genre straddling).
We can also notice that there is some overlap between the LDA-based genre
assignment and the Mobygames genres. A notable difference is that the classifica-
tions in the online databases have 8 (Mobygames) and 37 (Metacritic) genres,
whereas the topic model generates 31 genres arising from the data. Our results indi-
cate that it matters greatly which method is used to assign genre to video games. This
means that further research is required introducing alternative methods and

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

16 Games and Culture

comparing them. One important advantage of the topic model is that it provides
much richer information on the genre affiliations of each game. It enables us to dis-
tinguish between core and peripheral genres in games with multiple-genre member-
ship and to create a genre profile for each game. We are unaware of other methods
able to do this in an efficient manner.

Discussion and Conclusions

Our exercise with two alternative methods of assigning genre reveals that the chosen
method has a substantial impact on which genre is assigned to each game, how
games are distributed among genres, and how the distribution evolves over time.
We believe that the most important benefit of the LDA method is that the genre
structure arises from the data. Hence, it does not impose an existing classification
but allows the data set to determine the genre landscape and its evolution.
Many commentators state that there is not much innovation taking place in video
games (e.g., Tschang, 2007). Our results from the LDA exercise indicate that the
years of extensive genre innovation are behind us, and the genre structure has
remained relatively stable since the early 1990s. The bulk of the genre innovation
appears to have taken place during the 1980s when many genres have been prevalent
for a short period of time and then been replaced by others. The period of active
genre innovation in the 1980s may have been due to rapid technological develop-
ment in consoles and aggressive competition between them. It may also have
been due to the significant growth in the user population whose tastes have been
unknown by game developers and publishers leading to extensive experimentation.
As technological and market uncertainties have been resolved, genre innovation
has declined. Further research could help shed light on the relationship of genre
innovation and changes in the technological and user environment. By limiting
the data-driven analysis to specific consoles (or a set of similar consoles), it could
be possible to use the statistics created by the LDA model to analyze whether there
are differences between the game populations related to different consoles as to their
innovativeness and diversity. In this way, it might be possible to tie the successes
and failures in the console market into the successes and failures of different genres.
Another possibility would be to compare the innovative dynamics of the early video
game industry to that of the early film industry. Ample data on early films exist, and
it would probably be possible to find a database of film synopses. Such a compara-
tive analysis could help us to elaborate on the differences between games and movies
in how they are consumed, how they are dependent on technology, and how such
differences affect innovation.
Our analysis is limited to inter-genre innovation and does not capture possible
within-genre innovation. Genres are dynamic (Myers, 2003), and future analyses
on game content should take this into account. Dynamic LDA models (Blei &
Lafferty, 2006; Ren, Dunson, & Carin, 2008) allow the analysis of changes in topic
(genre) content. This is made possible by allowing topics to dynamically evolve over

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

Faisal and Peltoniemi 17

time. Effectively, topics for documents that appear later in time are smoothly
evolved from topics that appear in earlier documents. Extensions of multitask LDA
models toward dynamic topic modeling offers opportunities for examining changes
in the social construction of genres over time and may reveal interesting innovation
trends in game content. That type of analysis would be the logical next step in our
research.
The results from the LDA model also enable further examination of successful
and failed game genres. The timing of their introductions in relation to the dynamics
of the genre structure would shed light on what kind of an environment is conducive
to genre innovation. Are new genres more likely to take on when also other new gen-
res are introduced? Are initial sales important in predicting genre popularity7 over
the longer period? Can a concentrated genre structure (i.e., a small number of pop-
ular genres) inhibit genre innovation? In music, it has been found that new genres
may fail to gain popularity because there is an insufficient contrast with existing
genres (Hannan, Pólos, & Carroll, 2007). This could also be tested in games with the
help of the LDA results. Overall, connecting data on genre innovation with sales data
would be an important step in understanding where the sweet spot between too much
familiarity and too much innovation lies. It would also be interesting to see whether
certain genres are able to persist despite low sales.
In LDA, the meanings of a topic can be interpreted based on the top most prob-
able words of the genre. We believe that any suitable manual or automatic interpre-
tation of a topic/genre based on the cumulative semantic meanings of top words
would be suitable. In our study, we have resorted to a manual interpretation of each
genre based on its top 15 most probable words indicated by the topic model. Future
work can benefit from ongoing efforts in the machine learning community to auto-
matize the interpretation of the top words (see Lau, Newman, & Baldwin, 2014;
Newman, Lau, Grieser, & Baldwin, 2010).
Genre studies emphasize that genres are retrospect: They can only be observed
once a sufficient number of products have been produced and the discourse around
them has developed (Altman, 1999; Arsenault, 2009). The genre structure generated
with the LDA model is also retrospect and therefore is of only limited usefulness in
making predictions. Moreover, the LDA model cannot make clear distinctions
between interactive and representational genres but blends these dimensions based
on how they are blended in the texts describing the games. Hence, it follows Clear-
water’s (2011) view which holds that gameplay and iconography cannot be completely
separated.
As the LDA model relies on the textual descriptions created by avid gamers, the
game descriptions become critical for creating an accurate genre structure. This may
be seen as a weakness of the method, but it also has the advantage of bringing in the
social aspect of genres. Genres are dependent on how the audience talks about them
and how they use genre vocabulary when discussing individual products (Altman,
1999; Clearwater, 2011). Therefore, using game synopses as the data source includes
user experience and how that experience is vocalized. However, there may be game

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

18 Games and Culture

characteristics that are very difficult or impossible to put into words whereas certain
visual cues may be much easier to express verbally. Detailed case studies on games
with similar LDA-based genre profiles could help us to discover such elements and
shed further light on the nature of game experience in general. Moreover, such
micro-level analysis could help us to see whether genre-specific jargons emerge.
Inspiration for further steps could be sought from political and media studies where
there are rich traditions of quantitative content analysis of various topical texts, such
as presidential addresses (see Krippendorff, 2012). Similarly, complementing our
analysis with context information (either at sentence level or writer’s ideology,
e.g., by borrowing developments from computational discourse analysis, see Lin,
Xing, & Hauptmann, 2008) could improve the findings.
Our analysis indicates that the results of genre assignment and genre evolution
vary depending on which method is used to assign genre to games. Genre assignment
is a crucial step when empirical research is conducted in studying changes in game
content. Rather than offering a definite solution to this problem, we encourage the
researcher community to introduce and test alternative methods. In this study, we
have evaluated the topic model that is neutral to whether game characteristics are
representational or interactive. Future studies that can focus the analysis on one or
the other characteristic would enable us to distinguish between how the game con-
tent landscape changes in aesthetic and ludological terms.
If we look at individual games (Figure 5), genre assignment based on LDA or
product databases both lead to sensible results and in that sense both methods are
viable alternatives for getting a genre label when analyzing individual games. On the
other hand, if we are interested in the evolution of or trends in the genre landscape
over many years across thousands of games, then different methods lead to different
results. The proposed LDA method appears more attractive in this scenario as it
assigns multiple genres to each game with different probabilities that sum to
100%. This probabilistic assignment when used to cumulatively build a trend of gen-
res across several years and thousands of games provides a more efficient and power-
ful tool. This being said we encourage researchers to devise alternative schemes for
the challenging problem of studying genre trends and evolution across many years.

Appendix
Detailed Description of the Topic Model
The game synopses were cleaned through established text-mining methods. First, all
punctuation marks and numbers were removed, and all text was reduced to lower
case. Second, standard STOP words were removed (see Salton, 1971). These are
words that are common in most documents and do not correspond to any particular
subject matter. They include pronouns (it, you, and we), connectives (and, but, and
also), prepositions (of, in, and to), and auxiliaries (is, do, and can).8 Third, the
remaining words were stemmed, that is, inflected words were reduced to their stem

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

Faisal and Peltoniemi 19

(see Porter, 1980). For example, plurals were turned into singulars and verbs were
changed into present tense. Finally, any word that occurred less than 10 times in the
entire corpus was deleted. This left us with a vocabulary of 6,101 distinct words, and
on average slightly more than 68 words per synopsis. Games published for several
consoles were included only once in the analysis.
The computational problem is to estimate the hidden topic structure that most
likely can generate the original observed documents. Exact inference (i.e., comput-
ing the posterior over the hidden parameters) for this model is intractable (Blei et al.,
2003), and therefore approximate Bayesian inference schemes (see e.g., Asuncion,
Welling, Smyth, & Teh, 2009; Gelman, Carlin, Stern, & Rubin, 2004) are used to
infer the model parameters (i.e., per document distribution over topics and per topic
distribution over words).
Traditionally, topic modeling has required the text documents and the number of
topics as inputs to produce the topic structure (per document distribution over topics
and per topic distribution over words) as the output. It is a crucial assumption in
basic LDA models that the total number of topics needs to be prespecified prior
to any analysis. However, we prefer the number of the topics or genres to emerge
from the data rather than to decide this on our own. Fortunately, the Bayesian non-
parametric LDA models (Faisal et al., 2013; Teh, Jordan, Beal, & Blei, 2006;
Williamson, Wang, Heller, & Blei, 2010) provide an elegant solution: The number
of topics is determined by the textual documents during model inference and every
new document can exhibit previously unseen topics.
Furthermore, traditional LDA methods learn models from a single data source.
This means that a model is learned on the basis of, for example, games from the year
2000. Learning a model can be called a task. Basic LDA is a single task model.
When limited training samples are available for the learning task, single task meth-
ods may overfit or have too little information to infer parameters of complicated
models. The solution is the multitask learning paradigm: In multitask learning,
multiple related tasks are learnt jointly from their respective data sets by sharing
information across the tasks. For example, documents describing games from other
years may constitute such related tasks. We use a recent multi-task nonparametric
LDA model which is better suited to model topics in multiple heterogeneous collec-
tions of documents and has been shown to perform better than other LDA extensions
for the type of modeling exercise we are to perform (Faisal et al., 2013; Faisal, Gillberg,
Peltonen, Leen, & S., 2012).
To model the game genres, we conceptualize each game synopsis as a document.
In this conceptualization, learning genres or topics for each year is a task, and each
topic is a probability distribution over all unique words (also referred as the vocabu-
lary) in the entire collection of game synopses. The multitask nonparametric LDA
model is used to selectively share the information across the years, such that games
that appear in the same year tend to share topics more than games that appear in
some other year. The model effectively estimates (1) for each year, a distribution
over the topics that best represent all games in that year; (2) for each game synopsis,

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

20 Games and Culture

a distribution over the topics; and (3) finally, for each topic, a distribution over the
words in the vocabulary that are most probable for the topic.
A topic aims at representing a genre that specifies an ordering on the words. The
ordering implies how likely it is that a word defines a genre. By considering the top
words (having highest probabilities) in a topic, one can obtain objectively coherent
meanings of a genre that is more holistic than the one described by a single word.
Finally, by having a distribution over topics for each year, a comparison effectively
assigns different weights to genres. In the remainder of the article, we will refer to
the multitask nonparametric LDA model as LDA model and use the terms ‘‘game
synopsis’’ and ‘‘document,’’ as well as ‘‘year’’ and ‘‘task’’ interchangeably.
For computing the LDA model and choosing its hyperparameters, we used the
same approach as the real data experiments in Faisal, Gillberg, Leen, and Peltonen
(2013). For model learning, the so-called collapsed Gibbs sampler9 was run for
2,000 iterations. The equations for the conditional distribution, inference, and model
estimation are omitted for brevity.

Authors’ Note
Both authors contributed equally.

Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank the Aalto Science-IT project for computational resources.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: Ali Faisal has received funding from the Finnish Foundation
for Technology Promotion. Mirva Peltoniemi has received funding from Academy of Finland
(grant number 137808).

Notes
1. The synopses were retrieved from mobygames.com.
2. Interestingly, the same argument has been used in film studies. Altman (1999) argues that
genre labels for films cannot simply be borrowed from literature and theater.
3. Also, in film studies there is a mission to separate semantic genres, which concentrate on
shared iconography, and syntactic genres, which focus on shared structure and actions
(Altman, 1999).
4. As an extreme example, Wolf (2002) differentiates between 42 genres: abstract, adapta-
tion, adventure, artificial life, board games, capturing, card games, catching, chase, col-
lecting, combat, demo, diagnostic, dodging, driving, educational, escape, fighting, flying,
gambling, interactive movie, management simulation, maze, obstacle course, pencil and

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

Faisal and Peltoniemi 21

paper games, pinball, platform, programming games, puzzle, quiz, racing, role playing,
rhythm and dance, shoot’em up, simulation, sports, strategy, table-top games, target, text
adventure, training simulation and utility. These descriptions of interaction are, however,
at very different levels of abstraction. Dodging, fighting, driving, and flying are very con-
crete tasks, whereas strategy and action are higher level concepts that can include all of
these concrete tasks in their gameplay.
5. Prevalence here refers to how often a topic appears in the corpus. Each game is assigned a
topic probability distribution based on its content (see e.g., Figure 5). As these topic prob-
abilities are combined across the game population it is possible to determine how prevalent
is a given topic.
6. ‘‘Enemi’’ is the stemmed version of the word ‘‘enemies.’’
7. By popularity we refer to sales.
8. Full stop word list available from ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/smart/english.stop
9. The collapsed Gibbs sampler (Latent Dirichlet Allocation [LDA]; Blei et al., 2003;
Griffiths & Steyvers, 2004) is a powerful and one of the most straightforward methods for
approximate inference in mixture network like LDA, running it for one or two thousand
iterations is a standard practice and yields good performance (Blei et al., 2003; Griffiths
& Steyvers, 2004; Teh et al., 2006).

References
Aarseth, E. J. (1997). Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore [u.a.], MD:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
Alpaydin, E. (2014). Introduction to machine learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.
Altman, R. (1999). Film/Genre. London, England: BFI.
Apperley, T. H. (2006). Genre and game studies: Toward a critical approach to video game
genres. Simulation & Gaming, 37, 6–23.
Arsenault, D. (2009). Video game genre, evolution and innovation. Eludamos. Journal for
Computer Game Culture, 3, 149–176.
Asuncion, A., Welling, M., Smyth, P., & Teh, Y. W. (2009). On smoothing and inference for
topic models. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Conference on
Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Balland, P.-A., De Vaan, M., & Boschma, R. (2013). The dynamics of interfirm networks
along the industry life cycle: The case of the global video game industry, 1987–2007.
Journal of Economic Geography, 13, 741–765.
Bishop, C. M. (2006). Pattern recognition and machine learning (Vol. 4). New York, NY:
Springer.
Black, M. L. (2012). Narrative and spatial form in digital media: A platform study of the
SCUMM engine and Ron Gilbert’s the secret of Monkey Island. Games and Culture, 7,
209–237.
Blei, D. M., & Lafferty, J. D. (2006). Dynamic topic models. Proceedings of the 23rd inter-
national conference on Machine learning (pp. 113–120). Pittsburgh, PA: ACM.
Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent dirichlet allocation. Journal of Machine
Learning Research, 3, 993–1022.

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

22 Games and Culture

Carter, M., Gibbs, M., & Harrop, M. (2014). Drafting an army: The playful pastime of
Warhammer 40,000. Games and Culture, 9, 122–147.
Chess, S. (2014). Strange bedfellows: Subjectivity, romance, and hidden object video games.
Games and Culture, 9, 417–428.
Clearwater, D. (2011). What defines video game genre? Thinking about genre study after the
great divide. Loading . . . , 5. Retrieved August 4, 2015, from http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/
index.php/loading/article/view/67/105
Entertainment Software Association. (2014). Essential facts 2014 about the computer and
video game industry. Washington, DC: Author.
Faisal, A., Gillberg, J., Leen, G., & Peltonen, J. (2013). Transfer learning using a nonpara-
metric sparse topic model. Neurocomputing, 112(18), 124–137.
Faisal, A., Gillberg, J., Peltonen, J., Leen, G., & Kaski, K. (2012). Sparse nonparametric
topic model for transfer learning. Proceedings of European Symposium on Artificial
Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning, Bruges,
Norway, 269–274).
Gelman, A., Carlin, J. B., Stern, H. S., & Rubin, D. B. (2004). Bayesian data analysis. Boca
Raton, FL: Chapman & Hall/CRC.
Gillespie, G., & Crouse, D. (2012). There and back again: Nostalgia, art, and ideology in old-
school dungeons and dragons. Games and Culture, 7, 441–470.
Goetz, C. (2012). Tether and accretions: Fantasy as form in videogames. Games and Culture,
7, 419–440.
Griffiths, T. L., & Steyvers, M. (2004). Finding scientific topics. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 101, 5228–5235.
Hannan, M. T., Pólos, L., & Carroll, G. R. (2007). Logics of organization theory: Audiences,
codes, and ecologies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Harper, T. (2011). Rules, rhetoric, and genre: Procedural rhetoric in persona 3. Games and
Culture, 6, 395–413.
Hayes, M., & Dinsey, S. (1995). Games war. London, England: The Bowerdean.
Hitchens, M., Patrickson, B., & Young, S. (2014). Reality and terror, the first-person shooter
in current day settings. Games and Culture, 9, 3–29.
Hsu, G., Hannan, M. T., & Polos, L. (2011). Typecasting, legitimation, and form emergence:
A formal theory. Sociological Theory, 29, 97–123.
Hsu, G., Kocak, O., & Hannan, M. T. (2009). Multiple category memberships in markets: An
integrative theory and two empirical tests. American Sociological Review, 74, 150–169.
King, G., & Krzywinska, T. (2006). Tomb raiders and space invaders: Videogame forms and
contexts. London, GBR, England: I.B. Tauris.
Klevjer, R. (2005). Genre blindness. DIGRA Hard Core Columns. Retrieved November 15,
2006, from http://www.digra.org/hc11-rune-klevjer-genre-blindness/
Krippendorff, K. (2012). Content analysis: An introduction to its methodology. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Lau, J. H., Newman, D., & Baldwin, T. (2014). Automatically evaluating topic coherence and
topic model quality. Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics,
530–539. PA, USA: Stroudsburg.

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

Faisal and Peltoniemi 23

Lennon, J. L. (2010). Debriefing a health-related educational game: A case study. Simulation

& Gaming, 41, 390–399.
Lin, W.-H., Xing, E., & Hauptmann, A. (2008). A joint topic and perspective model for
ideological discourse. In D. Walter & M. Katharina (Eds.), European conference on Machine
Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases (pp. 17–32). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.
MacCallum-Stewart, E. (2010). Lost on a Desert Island: The sims 2 castaway as convergence
text. Games and Culture, 5, 278–297.
Mollick, E. (2012). People and process, suits and innovators: The role of individuals in firm
performance. Strategic Management Journal, 33, 1001–1015.
Myers, D. (2003). The nature of computer games: Play as semiosis. New York, NY: Peter
lang.
Mäyrä, F. (2008). An introduction to game studies. Games in culture. London, England: Sage.
Newman, D., Lau, J. H., Grieser, K., & Baldwin, T. (2010). Automatic evaluation of topic
coherence. Human Language Technologies: The 2010 Annual Conference of the North
American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (100–108).
Stroudsburg, PA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Paavilainen, J., Hamari, J., Stenros, J., & Kinnunen, J. (2013). Social network games: Players’
perspectives. Simulation & Gaming, 44, 794–820.
Patterson, C. B. (2014). Role-playing the multiculturalist umpire: Loyalty and war in
BioWare’s mass effect series. Games and Culture, 10, 207–228.
Poole, S. (2000). Trigger happy: Videogames and the entertainment revolution. New York,
NY: Arcade Publishing.
Porter, M. F. (1980). An algorithm for suffix stripping. Program, 14, 130137.
Ren, L., Dunson, D., & Carin, L. (2008). The dynamic Hierarchical Dirichlet process.
Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Machine Learning (pp. 824–831).
Helsinki, Finland: ACM.
Salton, G. (1971). The SMART retrieval system - Experiments in automatic document process-
ing. New Jersey, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Teh, Y. W., Jordan, M. I., Beal, M. J., & Blei, D. M. (2006). Hierarchical Dirichlet processes.
Journal of the American Statistical Association, 101, 1566–1581.
Thin, A. G., Hansen, L., & McEachen, D. (2011). Flow experience and mood states while
playing body movement-controlled video games. Games and Culture, 6, 414–428.
Tschang, F. T. (2007). Balancing the tensions between rationalization and creativity in the
video games industry. Organization Science, 18, 989–1005.
Williamson, S., Wang, C., Heller, K., & Blei, D. (2010). The IBP compound Dirichlet process
and its application to focused topic modeling. Proceedings of the 27th International
Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-10) (pp. 1151–1158). Israel: Haifa.
Wolf, M. J. P. (2002). Genre and the video game. In M. J. P. Wolf (Ed.), The medium of the
video game (pp. 113–134). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Voorhees, G. A. (2009). I play therefore i am Sid Meier’s civilization, turn-based strategy
games and the Cogito. Games and Culture, 4, 254–275.

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016

24 Games and Culture

Author Biographies
Ali Faisal is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical
Engineering at Aalto University in Finland. He received his PhD degree in computer science
from Aalto University in 2014. He has published in several journals including Neurocomput-
ing, PLoS ONE, Bioinformatics, and in prime computer science conferences. He has consid-
erable experience in probabilistic machine learning, Bayesian modeling, multisource
modeling and their application in information retrieval, computational biology and neu-
roscience, and collaborative filtering.
Mirva Peltoniemi, DrSc (Tech.), works as senior researcher in Technology Management at
the School of Business and Economics, University of Jyväskylä. Previously she has worked at
Aalto University School of Science and Tampere University of Technology. In her doctoral
research, she examined the evolution of the video games industry from the viewpoint of the
industry life-cycle theory. Since then she has been conducting research on changes in game
business and game content.

Downloaded from gac.sagepub.com at NORTHERN KENTUCKY UNIV on January 11, 2016