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Game Experience Evaluation. A Study of Game Reviews on the Steam Platform

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Digital Transformation and Global Society (DTGS 2020)

Abstract

Player experience is often difficult to understand, and it is not always clear to game developers which game features should be eliminated or maintained. By analyzing reviews of particular games, it is possible to create high-quality games and understand player psychology and game preferences. Our pilot study aimed to find out how people evaluate their game experience based on reviews on the Steam platform and to extract its main dimensions. By utilizing the Structural Topic Model (STM), we extended previous research on main components of game experience and found topics which were not discussed in previous works. Using the community detection method, we divided our topics into seven main dimensions that connect with different strength. Our research contributes more knowledge about the processes of evaluation as a whole and game evaluation in particular.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Steam Game and Player Statistics Web Page: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/.

  2. 2.

    Steam Community Official Web Page. Retrieved from https://steamcommunity.com.

  3. 3.

    STM R package: https://www.structuraltopicmodel.com.

  4. 4.

    https://juliasilge.com/blog/evaluating-stm/.

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Correspondence to Irina Busurkina .

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Busurkina, I., Karpenko, V., Tulubenskaya, E., Bulygin, D. (2020). Game Experience Evaluation. A Study of Game Reviews on the Steam Platform. In: Alexandrov, D.A., Boukhanovsky, A.V., Chugunov, A.V., Kabanov, Y., Koltsova, O., Musabirov, I. (eds) Digital Transformation and Global Society. DTGS 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1242. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65218-0_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65218-0_9

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