The effect of leaderboard ranking on players' perception of gaming fun

Abstract

Although fun is desirable in nearly all commercial games, defining it and actually getting it into a game can prove difficult. Developers have added multiplayer features to their games since the beginning of the industry in an attempt to create fun, but to what extent does this actually affect a player's perception of a game's fun? This paper gives an overview of relevant research relating to fun and play before attempting to tackle the key issue of the effect of player success as measured by leaderboard rankings on the perception of a game's fun. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.