# Game Development Topics: A Tag-Based Investigation on Game Development Stack Exchange
## 8 Discussion
### RQ2 Discussion  
The results presented for RQ2 may suggest that the more questions a tag has attached to it, the higher its community support. However a correlation analysis found no such phenomenon. In fact, the various figures above also show many cases where tags with a small number of questions are actually well supported.  
Beyond tags and their number of questions, we considered individual questions and the relation between their score and views and whether they receive accepted answers or not. We divided the questions into two sets (i.e., those with an accepted answer and those without) and computed their 5-number summary (minimum, first quartile, median, third quartile, maximum) plus the mean and standard deviation. Table 4 suggests that questions with accepted answers (\(AA\)) have slightly higher scores and number of views than those without (\(noAA\)).  
To obtain some statistical confidence, we use the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test (MWW), which is a non-parametric test able, in short, to tell us whether scores (or view counts) of questions with accepted answers are higher than those of questions without accepted answers. Additionally, to quantify the magnitude of such possible difference, we compute the effect size using another non parametric test, the Vargha-Delaney A (VD.A) [33]. We found that both scores and view counts of questions with accepted answers were indeed statistically higher but with negligible effect (VD.A of 0.51 for scores and 0.52 for views). This suggests that questions without accepted answers are not just the result of a lack of views or fewer upvotes.  
To better understand the data, we further analysed questions without accepted answers by considering their top 10 with respect to score and views.  
**Top scoring questions without accepted answers** tend to be open-ended or asking for explanations, as illustrated below:  
* _What are \"affordances\" in game design?_
* _What is an optimum failure rate that will keep people coming back to my game?_
* _How to avoid players getting lost in and/or bored by the meta game?_
* _Why do some games persistently have mostly one viable strategy, while others can have many?_  
Out of the top 10 (score-wise) questions without accepted answers, only one referred to a specific technology : _\"How do you handle aspect ratio differences with Unity 2D?\"_. (That question also stands out because, unlike the others, which generally receive an answer within the first two hours, that one took almost 6 days before a first answer.) The same question is also the most viewed question without an accepted answer. In fact, this fits into a larger pattern: unlike top scoring unanswered questions, **top viewed questions without accepted answers** are tied to a specific technology (_Unity_ in most cases but also _Python_ and _C_#). A few examples below:  
* _Pygame for python 3.5?_
* _How to detect that user has touched UI canvas in Unity 4.6?_
* _How can i export Unity games to Android?_
* _How do I have a camera follow my object in Unity?_  
Conversely, we looked at **questions with accepted answers**. For both score and views, the observations made above hold: questions with the highest scores tend to be high-level, open-ended, and centered on concept tags while questions with the most views are tied to a specific technology. This is unsurprising, as popular technologies tend to obtain more views but may be ultimately less specific to users' needs.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline  & & **min** & **Q1** & **Median** & **Q3** & **max** & **avg** & **std** \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Score} & noAA & \(-18\) & 0 & 1 & 2 & 132 & 1.52 & 3.93 \\  & AA & \(-10\) & 0 & 1 & 2 & 209 & 2.14 & 6.83 \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Views} & noAA & 17 & 163 & 424 & 1046 & 77,003 & 1110.79 & 2581.83 \\  & AA & 15 & 168 & 472 & 1301 & 129,994 & 1547.20 & 4423.81 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}  
* **noAA**: No Accepted Answer, A: Accepted Answer.  
\end{table}
Table 4: Scores and views for questions with accepted answers vs. those without accepted answers.