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© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Describing the permanence of cultural objects is an important step in understanding societal trends. A relatively novel cultural object is the video game, which is an interactive media, that is, the player is an active contributor to the overall experience. This article aims to investigate video game permanence in collective memory using their popularity as a proxy, employing data based on the Steam platform from July 2012 to December 2020. The objectives include characterizing the database; studying the growth of players, games, and game categories; providing a model for the relative popularity distribution; and applying this model in three strata, global, major categories, and among categories. We detected linear growth trends in the number of players and the number of categories, and an exponential trend in the number of games released. Furthermore, we verified that lognormal distributions, emerging from multiplicative processes, provide a first approximation for the popularity in all strata. In addition, we proposed an improvement via Box–Cox transformations with similar parameters (from 0.12 (95% CI: 0.18, 0.07) to 0.04 (95% CI: 0.08, 0)). We were able to justify this improved model by interpreting the magnitude of each Box–Cox parameter as a measure of memory effects.

Details

Title
Popularity of Video Games and Collective Memory
Author
Mendes, Leonardo O  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Cunha, Leonardo R  VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Mendes, Renio S
First page
860
Publication year
2022
Publication date
2022
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
10994300
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2693997427
Copyright
© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.