Over lunch a while back, Nic Ducheneaut mentioned that he enjoys sci-fi movies and TV shows so much (and there’s so little sci-fi content these days) that he’ll watch any sci-fi content he comes across on streaming platforms regardless of the specific plot or subgenre (e.g., space travel, aliens, post-apocalyptic, dystopia). And that got us [...]
The introduction of playable female characters into genres/franchises that historically only had playable male characters often elicits arguments in gamer forums around the low prevalence of female gamers in that particular genre/franchise and how adding female characters is pandering to a demographic that hardly plays the game to begin with. Apart from the “is-ought” fallacy, [...]
In this post, we’re taking a look at different combat approaches. Do you play as a stealthy assassin or do you rush in for action that is up close and personal? Do you try to avoid combat altogether? Maybe you prefer to soften up your targets from long range? See how you compare with other [...]
Asking gamers whether they like to play with other people actually gets pretty complicated. Are we talking co-op or competitive? Do you mean local or online? With friends or with strangers? So in a recent survey, we decided to break all this down. Do You Remember GoldenEye 007? As someone who grew up in the [...]
RPGs are known for creating deep narratives where players are able to immerse themselves in a compelling world and get lost in their “role”. As developers seek to create more immersive worlds, characters have become more and more customizable. Not only can players choose what their character looks like, or their base stats and abilities, [...]
One of the hallmarks of 4X games is the ability to use different approaches to achieve victory. These may include crushing your enemies on the battlefield, creating an economic superpower, or achieving cultural or scientific nirvana. I still remember watching my father play the original Civilization and being confused as to why he would waste [...]
Although gamers are often lumped together as “people who enjoy playing videogames”, there is often a lot of variability in the types of things people like to do while playing. Most have a preferred genre, and even within genres a preferred style of play. How We're Playing Fallout 4 Take Fallout 4 for example, a [...]
In our last blog post, we created a map of the Strategy game genre to explore how gamers’ preferences for Excitement or Strategy can influence the types of strategy games they are likely to play. But gaming motivations not only impact genre preference, they also impact playstyle within game genres. Leeroooooooy Jenkins! The infamous Leeroy [...]
We asked gamers to tell us how much they agreed or disagreed with polarizing statements about games and gamers. These statements touched on a broad range of issues, such as microtransactions, gender inclusiveness, and whether games are becoming too dumbed down. We received responses from 1,127 gamers. We’ll slice through this data in several ways, [...]
Using factor analysis to cluster motivations is a fairly standard method in psychology, but figuring out how to best show the individual results back to people is relatively understudied. This is because, as most readers know, research psychologists tend to publish aggregate findings in academic journals rather than create customized reports for each of their [...]