Videogame citation (Elsevier-Harvard) fields

whuber

This is how it is supposed to look when cited:

Doragon kuesuto faibu tenkū no hanayome (1992) Super Famicon. JP. Chunsoft (dev.), Enix (pub).

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride (2009) Nintendo DS. NA. Chunsoft (dev.), Enix (pub).

That's title, year, platform, region (could be place), developer and publisher.

What's the best way to add videogame titles to Zotero and store the "developer" and "publisher" fields? "Software" is what I'd been using, but it's not quite right.

adamsmith

Is the (dev) and (pub) part of the citation style or did you just add that for clarification? What is that format based on? Software is the right item type, but Elsevier Harvard isn't a richly defined citation style, so it's not like anyone every looked at this for software, let alone video games.

whuber

That seems to be part of the style, at least based on the guidance from the editors.

bwiernik

You can enter those labels in parentheses after the author’s given name.

whuber

That's sort of a hack: I'd as soon just hand-edit the bibliography after generating it.

bwiernik

Whatever works for you. This is the correctly supported method for diverse media creator roles (eg, producer, screenwriter), though admittedly labeling a programmer as “developer” is something I have never seen before.

whuber

There isn't an "author" type in software in any case: if we did use that method, what item type would be advised? ("Developer" is usually a collective entity, e.g. a studio, so they would be in full-name format.)

whuber

"Software" is really a strange fit for a digital game, to be honest, because the consensus is that games are designed, rather than programmed: the programming is almost never given anything like auteurist status. (The question of auteurism in games is a topic that I would happily go on about, but that would be a bit of a digression.)

MLA uses "rights-holder" in lieu of an auteur, though that's questionable in my view and I hope gets challenged (rights, after all, can be changed). Chicago more or less follows from film with producer/developer/studio as the author.

whuber

Forgive me for reviving this thread, but I'm thinking there may be room for considering this in the development of CSL. There's a very good paper on this subject here: http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/how-to-reference-a-digital-game/

I won't pretend to understand the ontological aspects of CSL in depth, but a "game" as an entity has a complicated relationship with materiality: a board game (like Liz Magie's "The Landlord Game", which enjoys a patent) vs a digital game. They are both authored works, however, and both can be research outputs which get cited.