The Austronesian Game Taxonomy: A cross-cultural dataset of historical games

Humans in most cultures around the world play rule-based games, yet research on the content and structure of these games is limited.

The current dataset provides ethnographic, historic information on games played in cultural groups in the Austronesian language family. These game descriptions are available and codeable for researchers interested in games. We also develop a unique typology of the cooperativeness of the goal structure of games and apply this typology to the dataset. Researchers are encouraged to use this dataset to examine cross-cultural variation in the cooperativeness of games and further our understanding of human cultural behaviour on a larger scale.

The R code (R Core Team, 2020, Version 4.0.3) for data filtering and the AustroGames dataset can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/ccp-eva/AustroGames and on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/record/4675217.

Users of the dataset or code are asked to cite this publication and the data (Leisterer-Peoples et al., 2021).