Describing, organizing, and maintaining video game development artifacts

Game development artifacts resulting from the creation process of video games, such as design documents, style guides, test builds, and marketing materials, provide rich contextual information about how and why the game was created. Better organizing and preserving these materials will not only enrich our understanding of the history of these media but also educate and inspire the next generation of video game creators. This research aims to improve our theoretical understanding of how to organize and represent game development artifacts by examining the various types of artifacts created and their attendant issues and challenges. We adopted a multimethod approach employing an examination of existing collections and 29 interviews with creators, information professionals, and game researchers. From these data, we analyze the current practices, expressed values, and perceived challenges of these stakeholders, produce a taxonomy of game development artifacts, and provide best practices recommendations for describing them.