Abstract
Playability is a key concept in game studies defining the overall quality of video games. Although its definition and frameworks are widely studied, methods to analyze and evaluate the playability of video games are still limited. Using heuristics for playability evaluation has long been the mainstream with its usefulness in detecting playability issues during game development well acknowledged. However, such a method falls short in evaluating the overall playability of video games as published software products and understanding the genuine needs of players. Thus, this paper proposes an approach to analyze the playability of video games by mining a large number of players’ opinions from their reviews. Guided by the game-as-system definition of playability, the approach is a data mining pipeline where sentiment analysis, binary classification, multi-label text classification, and topic modeling are sequentially performed. We also conducted a case study on a particular video game product with its 99,993 player reviews on the Steam platform. The results show that such a review-data-driven method can effectively evaluate the perceived quality of video games and enumerate their merits and defects in terms of playability.
Highlights
Playability has been widely acknowledged as the key concept reflecting the overall quality of a video game, in terms of its rules, mechanics, goals, and design within the process of design and analysis [1]
The results show that a two-step classification, i.e., “playability-informative” review filtering with Expectation Maximization for Naive Bayes (EMNB) and perspective classifying with multi-label text classification, has a much better accuracy rate than one-step classification with only MLTC
273,476 review sentences are automatically labeled as “playability-informative” using the pre-trained EMNB classifier with the 3000 training data
Summary
Playability has been widely acknowledged as the key concept reflecting the overall quality of a video game, in terms of its rules, mechanics, goals, and design within the process of design and analysis [1]. This concept is commonly used in game studies. It reflects the players’ degree of satisfaction towards their various ways of interaction with the game system, that is, in a nutshell, “A good game has good playability” [2] It can be narrowly interpreted as being equal to the quality of “gameplay” or the usability of video games, that cannot be balanced by “any non-functional designs” [3]. Seeing games as systems and taking into account the technical, mechanical, or material quality of video games, playability is “the design quality of a game, formed by its functionality, usability, and gameplay” [8]
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