Influencing Experience: The Effects of Reading Game Reviews on Player Experience

Livingston, Ian J.; Nacke, Lennart E.; Mandryk, Regan L.

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-24500-8_10

Cited by 19 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Recently, only a few initial studies [31,57] analyzed this phenomenon by investigating differences and similarities in video game rating and review language of experts and amateurs, and we still lack a large-scale analysis of video game reviews. The facts that video game reviews impact (i) sales as estimated via numerous regression models [11,21,74,75], (ii) player experience as surveyed by multiple authors [28,42,43] and potentially even (iii) developer plans as implicated by the game piracy study of Drachen et al [17] further support our view that video game reviews pose a relevant and fertile testbed for comparing expert with crowdsourced inputs. Research Questions.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 58%

What's in a Review

Santos

Lemmerich

Strohmaier

et al. 2019

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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As video game press ("experts") and casual gamers ("amateurs") have different motivations when writing video game reviews, discrepancies in their reviews may arise. To study such potential discrepancies, we conduct a large-scale investigation of more than 1 million reviews on the Metacritic review platform. In particular, we assess the existence and nature of discrepancies in video game appraisal by experts and amateurs, and how they manifest in ratings, over time, and in review language. Leveraging these insights, we explore the predictive power of early expert vs. amateur reviews in forecasting video game reputation in the short-and long-term. We find that amateurs, in contrast to experts, give more polarized ratings of video games, rate games surprisingly long after game release, and are positively biased towards older games. On a textual level, we observe that experts write rather complex, less readable texts than amateurs, whose reviews are more emotionally charged. While in the short-term amateur reviews are remarkably predictive of game reputation among other amateurs (achieving 91% ROC AUC in a binary classification), both expert and amateur reviews are equally well suited for long-term predictions. Overall, our work is the first large-scale comparative study of video game reviewing behavior, with practical implications for amateurs when deciding which games to play, and for game developers when planning which games to design, develop, or continuously support. More broadly, our work contributes to the discussion of wisdom of the few vs. wisdom of the crowds, as we uncover the limits of experts in capturing the views of amateurs in the particular context of video game reviews.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 58%

What's in a Review

Santos

Lemmerich

Strohmaier

et al. 2019

Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.

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“…The idea that players themselves have an effect on their game play is not novel, and some recent evidence suggests that players' interpretation of a game can change their experience significantly. Reading game reviews (Livingston et al, 2011) and referring to the ratings from external sources (Jenkins et al, 2010) affect the enjoyment of the game. Many players form an opinion about the game even before playing it, and this opinion may change their first encounter with the game.…”

Section: Immersion and Player Expectationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Player experience and deceptive expectations of difficulty adaptation in digital games

Denisova

Cairns

2019

Entertainment Computing

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Increasingly, digital games are including adaptive features that adjust the level of difficulty to match the skills of individual players. The intention is to improve and prolong the player experience by allowing the player to have the feeling of challenge without it being overwhelming and leading to repeated failure and frustration. Previous work has shown that player experience is indeed improved by such adaptations but also that the player experience can be improved also by simply claiming such an adaptation is present even when it is not. It is therefore possible that claims about adaptations and the actual adaptations could interact and not lead to the intended outcomes for the players or worse disappoint players. This paper reports on two studies that were conducted to experimentally investigate the interaction between game adaptations and player information about adaptations on the player experience, specifically their sense of immersion in the game. For this, two games were developed using two different kinds of adaptations to adjust difficulty based on players' performance in the game. Participants were provided with information about game adaptations independently of whether the adaptations were present. The results suggest that players felt more immersed in the game when told that the game adapts to them, regardless of whether the adaptation was present in the game or not. This effect was observed in both games despite their different adaptations and it remained prominent even during longer gaming sessions. These findings demonstrate that players' knowledge of adaptations influences their experience independently of adaptations. In this particular context, the knowledge reinforced the experience of the adaptations. This suggests that, at least in some circumstances, developers do not need to be concerned about negative effects of telling players about in-game adaptations.

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“…An example a recent study by Livingston et al which found that negative content had more impact than positive content on a user's subsequent review of a game [36]. While positive priming can be used to positively influence perceptual accuracy, it is possible that the residual effects of positive emotions may negatively influence a higher-level task.…”

Section: Limitationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Influencing visual judgment through affective priming

Harrison

Skau

Franconeri

et al. 2013

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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Recent research suggests that individual personality differences can influence performance with visualizations. In addition to stable personality traits, research in psychology has found that temporary changes in affect (emotion) can also significantly impact performance during cognitive tasks. In this paper, we show that affective priming also influences user performance on visual judgment tasks through an experiment that combines affective priming with longstanding graphical perception experiments. Our results suggest that affective priming can influence accuracy in common graphical perception tasks. We discuss possible explanations for these findings, and describe how these findings can be applied to design visualizations that are less (or more) susceptible to error in common visualization contexts.

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Influencing Experience: The Effects of Reading Game Reviews on Player Experience

Cited by 19 publications

References 17 publications

What's in a Review

What's in a Review

Player experience and deceptive expectations of difficulty adaptation in digital games

Influencing visual judgment through affective priming

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