The wisdom of the gaming crowd

Abstract

In this paper, we report on three projects in which we are applying natural language processing techniques to analyse video game reviews. We present our process, techniques, and progress for extracting and analysing player reviews from the gaming platform Steam. Analysing video game reviews presents great opportunity to assist players to choose games to buy, to help developers to improve their games, and to aid researchers in further understanding player experience in video games. With limited previous research that specifically focuses on game reviews, we aim to provide a baseline for future research to tackle some of the key challenges. Our work shows promise for using natural language processing techniques to automatically identify features, sentiment, and spam in video game reviews on the Steam platform.