Similarities and Divergences in Electronic Game Review Texts

Abstract

With the intensification of the electronic gaming industry and electronic gaming competitions, the repercussions of reviews involving games have become more common. Like a movie, an electronic game can be criticized for its features, including gameplay, story, audio, visuals, and multiplayer (if any). Because there are reviews written by specialists (critics) and ordinary users, there may be divergences and similarities between the reviews made by both audiences. Commonly, when The Game Awards (TGA) score comes out, players open forums and discuss their reviews about the games, their features, and if the prize should have been for the winner. This paper verifies the similarities and divergences of electronic game reviews between critics and ordinary users using text processing and information retrieval techniques. We collected reviews about eight games from the Metacritic website; four games played for TGA's best game of the Year Award. Our results indicated that the story element is the most commented by both types of users and that ordinary users tend to use gameplay and graphics when referring to the gameplay and visual elements, respectively. Critics and ordinary users do not often comment on the audio and multiplayer aspects. By using these results, game software engineers can consider new gameplay patterns and story or player modeling.