How have player experiences changed over the years? For instance, have there been general shifts in what kinds of emotions players experience and express? We probe these questions with help of recent methodological advances in psychology and Large Language Models (LLMs), in particular the possibility to predict Likert-scale responses based on free-form text. Applying this at scale to three player experience questionnaires (PXI, CORGIS, AESTHEMOS) and 152143 Metacritic user reviews from years 2010-2024, we reveal trends such as an increasing portion of reviews expressing emotional challenge, meaning, and nostalgia. We then analyze the contributions of different genres and games to the trends, in addition to reasons explicitly indicated by the reviews, and establish correlations between review scores and different player experience constructs. Taken together, our results provide novel insights into how player experiences have evolved. Methodologically, we propose and demonstrate a novel and scalable method for analyzing game reviews.

One central goal of game designers is to make games that resonate with players. Yet, within HCI games research, resonance is used vaguely as an everyday notion. In this work, we draw on psychological research on resonance to conduct a qualitative survey (n = 110) to explore how players characterize game experiences that resonated with them, to deliminate what resonance means for players and the interactive medium of games. Our findings illustrate how resonance captures the feeling of gameplay encounters that go on to have profound and long-lasting emotional and cognitive impacts. Our findings outline resonance as an underlying experiential quality relevant to various existing PX conceptualizations, such as eudaimonia, meaningfulness, reflection, emotional challenge, game feel, and perspective or behavioral change. Based on our findings, we outline resonance as a useful explanatory concept for what makes videogame experiences emotional, meaningful, moving, and even transformative experiences.

Entertainment videogames have been recognized for their potential therapeutic benefits, but there is a need for more in-depth, game-specific explorations of the game features that could contribute to such benefits. This study examines how players of Dark Souls describe the game as helping them cope with depression. We conducted a thematic analysis of Reddit discussions where players narrate their mental health experiences with the game, using AI tools to assist in identifying relevant data for a purposive sample. Our findings suggest that Dark Souls could support players’ mental health, for example, by (1) cultivating resilience and perseverance through its challenging gameplay, (2) triggering existential reflections through symbolic representations of depression, and (3) enabling supportive online communities and interactions. Our findings offer rich, player-centered insights into the perceived mental health benefits of commercial videogames, highlighting their potential to transcend entertainment and inform the design of engaging digital mental health tools.

Waiting is an everyday activity that is often present in video games. Waiting situations in games can take place during, for instance, loading screens, turn-based action, and cutscenes. Experiences of waiting can encompass a variety of emotions in players, such as anticipation, frustration, and boredom. Thus, understanding how waiting relates to players’ overall experience can be beneficial when designing or analysing games. However, academic discussion on waiting in games is quite scattered, and there is no comprehensive overview available on the subject. This paper contributes a semi-systematic literature review on the topic, augmented with a follow-up survey study. Based on the survey findings, we outline five perspectives from which waiting experiences can be analysed. These are 1) causes of waiting, 2) player goals for waiting, 3) player behaviour when waiting, 4) felt experience of waiting, and 5) player reasoning and decision-making. Our findings give an overview of sources of waiting in games and highlight that, in addition to affecting players' emotions, waiting is an aspect of gameplay that has an effect on players' decisions and behaviour.

Videogames can transform the perspectives and attitudes of players. Prior discussion on this transformative potential has typically been limited to non-entertainment videogames with explicit transformational goals. However, recreational gaming appears to hold considerable potential for igniting deeply personal experiences of profound transformation in players. Towards understanding this phenomenon, we conducted an explorative autoethnographic study. For this, the first author played five narrative-driven videogames while collecting self-observational and self-reflective data of his experience during and outside gameplay. Our findings offer intimate insights into the trajectory and emotional qualities of personally meaningful and transformative videogame experiences. For example, we found that gameplay experiences that were initially perceived as bewildering or disorienting could evolve into more harmonious experiences laden with personal meaning. This shift in experience developed through different forms of subsequent re-engagement with initially discrepant game encounters.

Mysteries are an engaging form of fiction, capturing audiences with curiosity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. However, mysteries in games have presented a challenge for research since the word mystery may be understood as 1) detective mysteries with clear-cut answers or 2) as mysteries which are unsolvable and incomprehensible. This paper focuses on the latter kind of mysteries. To investigate what constitutes a mystery player experience, in what ways mystery games provide answers to players and how to design these games, we inspected five mystery games through a formalist game analysis by a player-researcher. We discovered (1) how the mystery player experience was characterised by enjoyment of irresolution, state of not receiving clear-cut answers to a mystery, (2) how a mystery condition, a state of wonder and fascination, promoted openness, and (3) how interpretation management represented the doing in the mystery player experience. To our surprise, although the player was driven to find answers to mysteries, the eventual irresolution was an enjoyable experience to the player. We conclude that all mysteries need not be answered during the game, and the experience can be enjoyable because of this.