Components of game experience: An automatic text analysis of online reviews

A persistent challenge in video game studies has been articulating the various components of game experience inferred from traditional methods such as surveys and focus groups. To that purpose, online user reviews remain a rich yet underexplored resource for collecting feedback about game experience for the video game industry. After all, such data are often voluminous and unstructured, which complicates using traditional analytic tools designed for well-structured, quantitative data. In our study, to supplement current frameworks of game experience, we employed text analytics to automatically elicit components of the game experience from online reviews and examined each component's relative importance to user satisfaction. Our results revealed that narrative and achievement were the components most associated with user satisfaction with video games. Herein, after discussing our results, we elaborate upon their theoretical and practical implications.