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Abstract：
The game development industry is growing, and training new developers in game development-specific abilities is essential to satisfying its need for skilled game developers. These developers require effective learning resources to acquire the information they need and improve their game development skills. Question and Answer (Q&A) websites stand out as some of the most used online learning resources in software development. Many studies have investigated how Q&A websites help software developers become more experienced. However, no studies have explored Q&A websites aimed at game development, and there is little information about how game developers use and interact with these websites. In this paper, we study four Q&A communities by analyzing game development data we collected from their websites and the 347 responses received on a survey we ran with game developers. We observe that the communities have declined over the past few years and identify factors that correlate to these changes. Using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, we characterize the topics discussed in the communities. We also analyze how topics differ across communities and identify the most discussed topics. Furthermore, we find that survey respondents have a mostly negative view of the communities and tended to stop using the websites once they became more experienced. Finally, we provide recommendations on where game developers should post their questions, which can help mitigate the websites\' declines and improve their effectiveness.
摘要：
游戏开发产业不断壮大,和培训新的开发者在游戏开发特定的能力是必不可少的，以满足其需要熟练的游戏开发者。这些开发人员需要有效的学习资源来获取他们需要的信息并提高他们的游戏开发技能。问答（Q&A）网站是软件开发中最常用的在线学习资源之一。许多研究调查了问答网站如何帮助软件开发人员变得更有经验。然而,没有研究探索针对游戏开发的问答网站，关于游戏开发者如何使用和与这些网站互动的信息很少。在本文中,我们通过分析我们从他们的网站收集的游戏开发数据，以及我们与游戏开发者进行的一项调查中收到的347个回复，研究了四个问答社区。我们观察到社区在过去几年中有所下降，并确定了与这些变化相关的因素。使用潜在狄利克雷分配(LDA)模型，我们描述了社区中讨论的主题。我们还分析了社区之间的主题差异，并确定了讨论最多的主题。此外，我们发现，调查受访者对社区的看法大多是负面的，一旦他们变得更有经验，他们就倾向于停止使用网站。最后,我们提供游戏开发者应该在哪里发布他们的问题的建议，这可以帮助减轻网站的下降并提高其有效性。
