Analysing User Reviews for Evaluating Game Playability of Mobile Gaming Apps

Abstract

The playability of a game depends on the players� experience in terms of functionality,usability, and satisfaction. Mobile gaming has recently evolved because ofthe availability of suitable hardware, configurable mobile devices, and the abilityto download games from the Android and iOS platforms. Most online gamingstores allow customers to submit their reviews about gameplay, issues, and functionalitiespublicly. Game developers can better grasp such consumer issues byexamining player feedback and increasing how well-liked a game is among players.We have mapped the playability of S�nchez�s model with Schwartz�s theoryof human values and analyzed 20,346 user/player reviews from the top 15 gameapps in the Google Play Store. We have also created a labelled dataset of eachplayability category of S�nchez�s model. Finally, we applied a machine learningmodel to support the automatic classification of a review to a specific playabilitycategory violation. Our analysis shows that 30% of the reviews show human valuesviolations, consequently affecting game playability. We found that Socialism isthe most violated and Emotion is the least violated value category. We also foundthat only 18% of the user reviews received responses from the game app developersfor the value violations. Using fine-grained feature extraction, we found thetop 42 functionalities, issues, and concerns for the violations. The analysis resultsof our study give developers a foundation for creating apps that consider users�values for ensuring better playability of mobile game apps.