# Game Development Topics: A Tag-Based Investigation on Game Development Stack Exchange
## 4 Empirical Study Setup
### Research Questions and Metrics  
In this section, we present our research questions, their motivation, and the metrics associated with each of them. **RQ1: Which video-game development topics receive the most community attention? **  
_Motivation:_ An answer to this question gives developers an overview of the topics they are likely to encounter when they embark on developing a game. _Metrics:_ This first research question (RQ1) explores various popularity metrics (_view counts, favourite_ counts, _score_, number of _questions_) for a single tag (single tag here does not refer to a tag used alone for a question, but rather in opposition to the tag pair analysis of RQ3), with consideration to _tech_ tags and _concept_ tags. More specifically, we retrieved top _concept_ and _tech_ tags according to metrics such as the number of questions in which they were present, the cumulative (and average) number of views these questions generated, the cumulative (and average) score of these questions and the cumulative (and average) the number of times these questions were bookmarked as favourites. **RQ2: Which video-game development topics receive the most/least community support? **  
_Motivation:_ An answer to this question could help developers identify early topics for which they are more/less likely to receive community help. In particular, this RQ aims to provide insights on issues that are more likely to stall a project or require more resources, in the sense that community help (in this instance, from GDSE) is lacking. In short, and somewhat colloquially, game developers facing these kinds of issues may be on their own. _Metrics:_ This second research question (RQ2) explores various community support metrics associated to a single tag, also separately for tech tags and concept tags. We consider that, from the perspective of an asker, a question that does not receive an accepted answer is a failure. Furthermore, in successful cases, we take interest in the wait time between the moment a question is asked and the moment an accepted answer is provided. To evaluate the community support for a topic, we thus consider all the questions associated with its corresponding tag and collect two metrics:  
1. Its _failure rate_: the percentage of questions that do not have an accepted answer;
2. Its median (success) _wait time_: in other words, the median time for satisfactory answers (in these cases, where the question received an answer that its asker accepted). More specifically, we considered, for each tag, (i) the number of questions that use it, (ii) its failure rate (the percentage of these questions that do not have accepted answer), and (iii) its wait time (the median time for an accepted answer when there is indeed one). **RQ3: Which combinations of video-game development topics receive the most least community attention and support? **  
_Motivation:_ An answer to this question could inform the choices of game developers when it comes to, for instance, selecting technologies that have high support for a given concept or technologies that work well together or not. This third research question (RQ3) goes further in analysing the community support of tags, by focusing on two tags at a time instead of one. A key motivation for such investigation comes from the observation that some key tags, such as \"_Unity_\" ([[https://unity.com/](https://unity.com/)]([https://unity.com/](https://unity.com/)) (accessed on 1 October 2021)), are present in a lot of questions. Thus, we have an interest in unveiling which questions within that _Unity_ \"universe\" may be more popular or difficult. More broadly, studying pairs of tags can provide valuable information for both researchers and game developers, when it comes to community support, about (i) which technologies are the most/the least challenging to combine (_tech-tech_), (ii) which concepts are harder/easier to conjointly address (_concept-concept_), and (iii) the worst/best choices when choosing a technology to handle a given concept (_tech-concept_).