The Metadata Game

The first Metadata Game poster at FORCE18.

Last summer John Chodaki challenged me to develop something fun for a Metadata2020 presentation during the FORCE18 meeting in Montreal. I have always enjoyed games, so a collaborative game that could engage teams in the metadata creation process seemed like a natural candidate.

There were many metadata geeks and lots of ideas about what such a game would look like. We wanted a game that was easy to play and could engage non-experts, so the most significant challenge was to balance simplicity and reality. Making high-quality metadata repositories is difficult and sometimes detailed and tedious work. Too much realism would clearly make engagement difficult.

After many alpha and beta tests and playing many times with all kinds of people with many roles in the scholarly communication community we have settled on a simple game based on the FAIR Principles which is now available as a board, an instruction sheet, and a guide. It is also described in some detail here.

The Metadata Game was developed by Erin Robinson and Ted Habermann. Please let us know how you liked it or how it can be improved. Tweet pictures of finished boards to #metadatagame so we can watch the community grow. Also let us know if you think The Metadata Game could help your organization make better metadata.