Capturing Player Experience with Post-Game Commentaries

gamexplab.nl

In this paper, we conceptualize and identify post game experiences, that is, experiences gamers have once they stopped playing. We present two empirical studies: a focus group study and a game experience survey. The focus group study reveals first hand verbalizations of how gamers feel after game play. In the survey, we test a self report scale of different post game experiences as a first step towards the development of a Post Game Experience Questionnaire.

What are the aesthetics of platform games and what makes a platform level engaging, challenging and/or frustrating? We attempt to answer such questions through mining a large-set of crowd-sourced gameplay data of a clone of the classic platform game Super Mario Bros. The data consists of 40 short game levels that differ along six key level design parameters. Collectively, these levels are played 1560 times over the Internet and the perceived experience is annotated by experiment participants via self-reported ranking (pairwise preferences). Given the wealth of this crowd-sourced data, as all details about players' in-game behaviour are logged, the problem becomes one of extracting meaningful numerical features at the appropriate level of abstraction for the construction of generic computational models of player experience and, thereby, game aesthetics. We explore dissimilar types of features, including direct measurements of event and item frequencies, and features constructed through frequent sequence mining and go through an in-depth analysis of the interrelationship between level content, player's behavioural patterns and reported experience. Furthermore, the fusion of the extracted features allows us to predict reported player experience with a high accuracy even from short game segments. In addition to advancing our insight on the factors that contribute to platform game aesthetics, the results are useful for the personalisation of game experience via automatic game adaptation.

Player Experience (PX) concerns how players think and feel when interacting with a game. Although it is intrinsic to all games, few design tools exist that enable designers to approach PX in a directed, intentional manner. Drawing on existing design tools and experience-related theory focused on emotions, we present our tool Spectrum. Spectrum facilitates a PX-directed approach to game design that foregrounds intended player experience. Spectrum can also be used to critically probe people's conceptions of game experiences. In evaluations of Spectrum with designers, while all were committed to the notion of PX, not everyone was able to translate from emotions into playable scenarios, particularly when those emotions were either visceral in nature or unusual within existing games. In evaluations with players, participants sometimes struggled to fit emotionally-specific language around their game experiences, but also stated that such reflections added post-hoc value to their experiences.

The application of gameplay metrics to empirically express a player's engagement with the game system has become more appealing to a broader range of researchers beyond the computer sciences. Within game studies, the appropriation and use of gameplay metrics not only further shifts these methods beyond formalized user testing (e.g. with the aim of product improvement) but creates a demand for a more universal approach to game metric extraction that can be applied to a wider range of games and account for different social science research agendas. Set in the context of a study into player experiences with participants aged 14-16 years of age, a method of articulating and identifying key moments of game-play pertinent to an analysis of experience with simulated violence was required . This paper describes a pragmatic solution to the need to study a range of games that were determined not by the researchers but the study's participants. The solution exploits and examines the audio-video feedbacks presented to the player as part of their engagement with a game system. This paper broadly outlines this mode of metric extraction and its application to research that seeks to understand the nature of engagement and player motivations across a mixed methodology approach.

Proceedings of the 14th International Academic MindTrek Conference on Envisioning Future Media Environments - MindTrek '10, 2010

What does it mean to appreciate gameplay? When we judge a game's gameplay, what are the elements or characteristics of gameplay that we should focus our attention on? We report on a study that analyzed the use of the term gameplay in hundreds of thousands of user-submitted game reviews on a popular online website. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques we identified and extracted the adjectives that modified "gameplay", and then clustered those adjectives based on the words (nouns, verbs and adjectives) which appeared in the surrounding contexts. Our analysis of the resulting clusters shows a surprising richness in the variety of words used to describe gameplay, but more importantly we identify a popular aesthetic of gameplay. The primary elements of gameplay aesthetics are pacing, complexity, cognitive accessibility, scope, demand, and impact. This aesthetic provides two things: empirical support for the importance and centrality of the concepts we've outlined towards understanding gameplay, and evidence of the differences in language for describing gameplay between players and designers/scholars.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2013

Aim. This article presents the Gamer Response and Decision Framework as a tool for understanding how people interpret, make decisions, and learn during their video gaming experiences. Background. The Gamer Response and Decision Framework combines Rosenblatt’s Reader Response Theory with a variety of other concepts and frameworks related to new literacies, multimodality, learning theory, psychology, and video gaming. This Framework illustrates that every individual has unique experiences, knowledge, skills, agency, self-efficacy, and goals, and these components influence how people interpret and make decisions during video gameplay, which affects how the game unfolds as a unique experience for each gamer. Together these ideas illustrate that no two gamers have the same experience when playing a video game. Understanding video gameplay experiences is important as it represents a dynamic process in which gamers interpret a wide variety of multimodal symbols, experiment and learn in these digital environments, and solve complex problems in order to progress in the game. Conclusion. The Gamer Response and Decision Framework can be used to understand, investigate, and analyze video gameplay experiences and has significant implications for our understanding the thought, decision-making, and learning processes that gamers experience. In the future, researchers in a variety of fields including education, game studies, and game design can use this framework to analyze how people interact with video games.

Journal on Interactive Systems, 2020

The gaming industry has grown considerably in the last decades, designing experiences and interactive platforms through games, a popular culture entertainment medium. With the advancement of technologies and user experience design methods, a challenge is faced for the constant improvement of game characteristics aiming to improve pleasurability and immersion perceived by its users. To face this challenge, we designed a conceptual framework named GLIMPSE based on constructs used to evaluate user experiences with games. Its applicability was tested through a questionnaire that collected 241 valid responses from users of gaming forums and communities. An analysis was drawn to identify correlations between the data collected from the questionnaire, and its results revealed significant statistical data highlighting age and gender-wise differences from participants’ opinions.

Simulation & Gaming

In this article, we develop a method, that we call the gameplay review method, for measuring players’ engagement with digital games through players’ interactions with video recordings of their own gameplay. The gameplay review method arose from a microsociological study of the gameplay of eight young adults who each played approximately 20 hours of World of Warcraft over a 3-month period in 2012. Using data from indepth interviews and audiovisual recordings of one of the eight participants, this article focuses on how the method leveraged participants’ knowledge of their experiences and ties that knowledge to measures of engagement. We outline the method’s four-step process (producing Level I data, analyzing Level I data, producing Level II data, analyzing Level II data) to guide the generation and analysis of rich video data. The method involves focused discussions on selected recorded segments of participants’ gameplay and is a means of connecting game design with both empirical and interpretive data. We show how, as participants progress, they learn about game design features and deepen their understanding of games. We found that participants’ developing perceptions of, and relationships to, design features affect their engagement with digital games. The gameplay review method is significant in its ability to measure engagement by dealing explicitly with empirical and interpretive data.

2012

Abstract Using gameplay metrics to articulate player interaction within game systems has received increased interest in game studies. The value of gameplay metrics comes from a desire to empirically validate over a decade of theorization of player experience and knowledge of games as ludic systems.