seo - What microdata makes video game images appear on google desktop search carousel

Question

If you search for "video games" in Google USA with a desktop browser, google displays a title "Video games" and a scrollable carousel of video games and their images. How can I get my title there?

What schema/product type needs to be configured into my website to make it theoretically possible to display my games on that scroller.

It seems that this code does not work:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/VideoGame" 
  <meta itemprop="operatingSystem" content="Any">
  etc.

Answer 1

Please note that Google recommends a structured data format such as JSON-LD (but not microdata as shown in your example):

JSON-LD* (Recommended) A JavaScript notation embedded in a tag in the page head or body.

In general, Google supports and promotes amp framework, which in turn has an option such as Web History. Google also supports amp web history including carousel for Google Discover:

Carousel on Google Discover: Web Stories can appear on Google Discover on Android and iOS via the latest Google app in the form of a carousel near the top of the feed. The carousel is available in the United States, India, and Brazil.

The Schema also has the beta type AmpStory. However, Google currently has no support for this type (???).

The existing Google documentation for structured data has the guide for an image carousel, but only types are supported there:

To enable a carousel for your site, add Carousel structured data in combination with one of the following supported content types:

Course

Movie

Recipe

Restaurant

Thus, it will not work for your games.

Perhaps the best solution is to experiment with amp stories and the beta type for these stories. There is the property about on which you can embed the top-level type Game and your images with the type ImageObject for games.

Read more Best practices for creating Web Stories of Google.