Sentiment Analysis of Souls-like Role-Playing Video Game Reviews

Abstract

The emotions and experiences of players are complex as they can vary due to many factors, such as the difficulty of a video game. However, after finishing video games, most players write reviews of them in which their experiences are described. To understand these better regarding challenging video games, sentiment and textual analyses were conducted on Steam reviews. 993932 reviews were scraped from its website and were imported into R. Using several packages available in R (syuzhet, dplyr, tidytext, ggpubr) and the NRC Emotion Lexicon, the data were investigated. Reviews were grouped into negative and positive ones. According to the results, the following can be concluded regarding player experience in challenging video games: 1) Significant differences exist in case of all emotions and sentiments between the two groups; 2) The emotional valence among both groups significantly differs as well: of negative reviews, it is below zero, and of positive ones is above it; 3) In case of positive reviews, the commonly used words better detail player experiences than in case of negative ones; 4) Regarding the number of votes on and words in both negative and positive reviews, no correlation can be found between them. However, negative reviews are more likely to be agreed with.