Neuromarketing and the gaming consumer: a systematic review of attention, emotion, and memory in player engagement and retention.

Abstract

The global video game industry has overtaken other cultural sectors in scale, intensifying competition for player attention, engagement, and long-term retention. Increasingly, firms pair digital marketing with neuromarketing, a set of methods drawn from cognitive neuroscience that measure attention, emotion, and memory to understand the implicit processes underlying consumer decisions. Yet evidence on how these approaches shape retention in gaming, and on how their effects can be validly measured, remains fragmented. This systematic review, following PRISMA 2020, synthesizes 54 studies published between 2009 and 2025, identified through Boolean searching of three bibliographic databases and supplemented by citation tracking. Studies were eligible if they addressed this intersection in video game contexts, or in adjacent consumer settings serving as methodological models; each was appraised for risk of bias by two reviewers independently, using AMSTAR 2, JBI and CASP instruments according to design, and common criteria of sampling clarity, procedural transparency and replicability for quantitative studies. The corpus combined quantitative-empirical (64.8%), mixed or theoretical (25.9%), and qualitative (9.3%) designs, of which 51.9% were rated high quality. Two complementary measurement streams emerged: behavioral and self-report approaches, and physiological or neuromarketing approaches using electroencephalography, eye-tracking, galvanic skin response, and facial coding. Across studies, implicit indices of attention allocation, affective response, and memory encoding were associated with engagement and with antecedents of retention beyond self-report. Studies reporting attention and engagement outcomes more often favored neuromarketing-informed approaches, but this evidence is largely associational rather than based on direct comparison with conventional campaigns, and reported magnitudes varied too widely to pool. Convergent evidence linked visual congruence, narrative and emotional design, parasocial influencer relationships, community co-creation, and algorithmic personalization to sustained play. Three limitations recur: a reliance on cross-sectional rather than longitudinal designs, the limited ecological validity of laboratory measurement, and a geographic concentration in Western Europe, North America, and East Asia. We further distinguish static neuromarketing measurement from dynamic, neuromarketing-informed design, arguing that the latter raises distinct ethical concerns for autonomy, biometric data, and vulnerable players. The review offers an integrative framework for studying the gaming consumer and sets out priorities for ecologically valid, ethically governed research.