If you couldn't attend our GDC talk this year, you're in luck. Our GDC 2019 talk is available publicly on the GDC Vault. We've also updated the reference sheets for the Gamer Motivation Model (as presented in the talk). Click the links below to watch the talk, download the slides PDF, or download the updated [...]
[This post is co-authored with Jennifer Day and Chris Karzmark, both PhD students at UCSC in Cognitive Psychology.] At first glance, gaming and VR seem like a natural pairing, especially with their shared emphasis on action-oriented and immersive content. But gamer adoption has been slow and enthusiasm among developers is also waning. In this post, [...]
Since the beginning of the year, Quantic Foundry and Niko Partners have been working together on a series of survey-based projects. Niko Partners is a market research and consulting firm covering the games markets in Asia. In one of these projects, we used the Gamer Motivation Model as part of a larger study to create [...]
In our talk at GDC 2018, we explored what gamer motivations would look like if we defined “casual/core/hardcore” gamers using different assumptions—e.g., by self-identification with labels vs. by gaming frequency vs. by specific game titles they play. In this blog post, we’ll focus on the slice by self-identification with labels, but we’re hoping to cover [...]
We recently linked up the game titles from our data set with available metadata from places like Steam and IGDB. As part of this, we’ve been playing around a lot with Steam tags. In this blog post, I’ll show you what happened when we tried to visualize how Steam tags are related to each other. [...]
The availability of female protagonists in video games and the push for more playable female characters has been a hot topic in recent years. For example, articles on the gender breakdowns at E3 or reasons that game companies provide for not having playable female characters often engender a great deal of discussion. In this blog [...]
Given that most board games are primarily designed to be a social activity, solo board gamers at first glance seem like misplaced unicorns. On the other hand, BoardGameGeek has annual awards for solo games, its catalog takes care to tag the opportunity for solo play and solo variants, and many games do support solo gameplay. [...]
We finally had time to dive into our board game data. As some of you know, we created a Board Game Motivation Profile from the ground up (using the same method as the Gamer Motivation Profile), and over 90,000 board gamers have taken part in it. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the [...]
As many of you know, Nic Ducheneaut and I focused on MMOs when we began our careers in games research. And in both the research and gaming communities of these online games, there’s a commonly-held assumption about how gamers fall along the social spectrum. In its most basic form, the spectrum has warm, fuzzy, social [...]
In many of our blog posts, we explore our data through the lens of gaming motivations. This time around, we’re going to focus on another kind of preference—thematic appeal. Or put another way, if the game mechanics are the same, how much does it matter that you’re killing orcs vs. space aliens? See how you [...]