iSchool Capstone

Steam Achievement Classification & Analytics Project

Project tags:

data science & visualization

Project poster

Classification, whether it be for groceries, books, music or the countless other commodities that require effective browsing and retrieval, bring with them the challenge of organizing materials in a coherent manner. Console and computer games are no different in that respect, but provide an additional challenge. As an interactive medium, games are largely defined by the choices and actions that players are allowed to make. The Steam Achievement Classification Analysis Project is a quantitative exploratory analysis that utilizes the rewards given to players in the form of “achievements”, and by way of text-mining and clustering games based on those achievements, provides insight into how thematically similar games differ in the tasks players are directed to accomplish. As the research shows, although existing tags and categories can reasonably define groups of interactive games, those groupings can often belie serious variations in the interactive dimension of those games.

Project participants:

Adam Lathrop

MLIS

Daniel Wilson

MSIM