Storytelling in mobile games: Cross-cultural analysis of narrative engagement, retention, and monetization

With mobile gaming becoming ever more popular, it is necessary to understand various aspects of player behaviour in those games. This is especially true for free-to-play games as revenue comes from a small subset of the playerbase. This paper presents a large-scale analysis of data collected over 9 months, comprising over 10 million players of a case study free-to-play mobile interactive story telling video game. The data is analysed from a temporal standpoint, followed by presentation of findings in three important player engagement aspects: retention, conversion (i.e., players becoming payers), and lifetime revenue collected. These findings confirm the importance of early conversion in casual mobile games as the retention is low due to wide target audience. Additionally, players who convert very early also tend to spend more in the game in general. Most of the monetization depends on a small fraction of large spenders as one fifth of the entire revenue comes from only 2% of spenders. The paper stresses out the key checkpoints in casual gameplay that are potentially most profitable topics for further research and player targeted actions. The insights of long-term analysis are relevant to both academia and industry in the efforts to optimise service quality, players' satisfaction, and profitability.

How do video games tell “the good China story”? In reviewing Chinese official media's months-long criticism of the mobile MOBA game, Honor of Kings (Wangzhe rongyao 王者榮耀), and the game's rounds of responses in 2017 and 2018, this article investigates a unique digital object that affords storytelling in video games: skin (pifu 皮膚). Neither a playable character per se nor a player's avatar, skin constitutes a special digital milieu where China stories are told, debated, and their “goodness” performed. It traverses various composing strata of video games and distributes narrative into a game's mechanics, procedure, representation, playing experience, and more. Skin, the author argues, is a yet-theorized differentiator that anchors “Chineseness” in the world of video gaming. It is a new site in a digital age in which the theoretical problem of Chineseness manifests different kinds of difficulty. The article ends with a discussion of the significance of researching skin to our understanding of what a Chinese video game is. The author calls for a new conceptualization of a Chinese video game that accounts for video game's medium specificity. Speaking to scholars of both Chinese studies and digital game studies, this article anticipates more scholarly interest in the intersection of the two fields.

Storifying a Serious Mobile Game: Exploring Players’ Perception of Storification Features, Narrative Engagement, and Behavioral Intentions

As the mobile social game business heats up, it is crucial to establish a systematic methodology that can deal with the globalization of mobile social games. There are many challenges that come from this globalization. One of them, is the cross-cultural analysis of user behavior in mobile social game contexts. Many Japanese vendors had difficulties with hidden cross-cultural issues in 2012. The author analyzes the cross-cultural lessons learned from the endeavors to globalize mobile social games. Then, the author discusses a basis for the systematical analysis of cross-cultural challenges.

In this paper we explore design issues in developing a mobile storytelling game application for young children. As a prototype, we have developed a digital story-reading game application based on Aesop‘s fable titled “The lion and the mouse”. The prototype features chapter-divided storytelling sequences, mini games including quizzes and puzzles, player interaction, and voice recording. These features are designed and implemented based on the concept of Lazzaro’s four keys to fun.

This paper explores the design of digitally mediated, gamified experiences in the environment of art exhibitions. We use the trajectories HCI framework for analysis and design, decomposing the overall experience in different levels. First, we develop a storytelling game that is meant to be experienced by ‘many’ visitors, leveraging a group gameplay that fosters social interactions between the group members. Second, the gamified experience unfolds in ‘many’ physical spaces, with multiple collections of artworks. We model alternative spatial layouts and discuss how these affect the evolving group experience. Finally, ‘many’ stands for repeat visits: inviting people in gamified cultural experiences over and over again, with potentially new groups and in different exhibitions, we examine the impact of prior game participation. Throughout the paper, we showcase how the use of trajectories enables us to clearly reflect and investigate all the aforementioned ‘manies’, in a combined, holistic way.

Building Mobile game storytelling based on Korean original culture - Focusing on the case of Korean Franchise Restaurant Bibigo -

Humor serves as a universal language that transcends cultural and temporal boundaries. This paper explores the wit, satire, and narrative brilliance in the works of Stephen Leacock, Mark Twain, and R.K. Narayan, focusing on their distinctive approaches to humor in storytelling. By examining select works, the study aims to highlight the cultural contexts, linguistic subtleties, and thematic depth that define their humor. The objectives of the research are to identify the techniques employed by these authors to evoke laughter, analyze how humor reflects the socio-political and cultural realities of their respective times, and examine its role in shaping narrative engagement and reader empathy. The research employs a comparative literary method, analyzing primary texts and employing tools from humor theory, narratology, and cultural studies. It juxtaposes the situational comedy of Leacock, the biting satire of Twain, and the understated humor of Narayan to uncover shared themes and distinct narrative strategies. Close reading and textual analysis form the core of the methodology, supported by secondary research to contextualize the findings. The study reveals that while Leacock's humor often hinges on absurdity and hyperbole, Twain uses satire as a critique of societal hypocrisies, and Narayan employs gentle irony to depict the idiosyncrasies of Indian life. Together, their works illustrate how humor serves as both entertainment and a lens for social commentary. The findings have significant implications for humor studies and cross-cultural literary analysis, offering insights into the ways humor bridges diverse cultural landscapes and enhances narrative impact. The research contributes to understanding humor as a vital literary device with profound societal relevance.

This research investigates the use of English in luxury fashion print advertising, which continues to be the main channel to communicate new luxury fashion collections and products. The research aims to find cultural adaptations from the original Anglo-Saxon country to the target country. Further, this research examines the use of images in fashion magazines and, in particular, their capacity to deliver brand personality and aesthetics by creating a narrative engagement. By analyzing thirty print advertisements from U.S. and Spanish life-style magazines using the semiotic approach, checking for linguistic differences, and employing a robust, cross-cultural qualitative analysis, the authors conclude that each linguistic element in an advertisement may invoke an underlying message that can be comprehended by the majority of consumers, and that language selection itself can have a strong symbolic meaning.