The Cultural Macroevolution of Arcade Video Games

This repository contains data and code for the paper:

"The Cultural Macroevolution of Arcade Video Games: Innovation, Collaboration, and Collapse"
Sergi Valverde, Blai Vidiella, Andrej Spiridonov, and R. Alexander Bentley
Published in Evolutionary Human Sciences

We analyze over 7,000 arcade video games using structured metadata from the MAME emulator project (https://www.mamedev.org) to study how cultural genres emerge, evolve, and collapse over time.

📊 Graphical Abstract

This figure summarizes the main findings of our paper.

📂 Repository Contents

• data/: Cleaned arcade dataset (arcade.csv) and compressed raw MAME metadata (database.xml.zip)
• code/: Python notebooks for figure generation
• sm/: Supplementary plots from the paper

📊 Reproducing the Analysis

1. Install Python 3 and the following packages:
   pandas, numpy, matplotlib, seaborn, scipy, jupyter
2. Open the notebook for each figure, e.g:
   code/fig1.ipynb

📜 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for details.

📌 Citation

If you use this code or data, please cite:

Valverde S, Vidiella B, Spiridonov A, Bentley RA. The Cultural Macroevolution of Arcade Video Games: Innovation, Collaboration, and Collapse. Evolutionary Human Sciences. Published online 2025:1-26. doi:10.1017/ehs.2025.10015