Exploring Playability and Player Experience in Smartphone Games: A Sentiment and Thematic Analysis of Player Reviews

Abstract The global prevalence and popularity of video gaming continue to rise, with games rapidly advancing in graphics, controls, storylines, and device hardware optimization. Today, video games span a wide range of platforms, including desktops, smartphones, tablets, consoles, virtual reality (VR) headsets, and even smartwatches. Despite platform differences, all games are designed to engage players and foster a positive player experience (PX), driven by diverse motivations. In this digital age, players frequently share feedback through star ratings and descriptive reviews, offering valuable insights into playability and PX. Analyzing this user-generated content is essential for understanding current trends and improving player-centric game design across platforms. This study focuses on smartphone games, motivated by the widespread global use of smartphones. We analyzed 4,595 player reviews from 289 smartphone games across 33 genres on Android and iOS platforms. Our three-step process involved: (1) collecting player reviews, (2) conducting binary sentiment analysis using both machine learning (ML) and lexicon-based approaches, and (3) performing thematic analysis on reviews classified by the best-performing sentiment analysis method. We found that the lexicon-based approach outperformed the machine learning approach, achieving an F1 score of 0.91 compared to the best performing ML model’s F1 score of 0.85. While the thematic analysis approach identified 23 playability and player experience factors grouped into four main categories: in-game advertisements (6 factors), sales and customer service (5 factors), technical issues (9 factors), and game design and gameplay (3 factors). Within the game design and gameplay category, we further identified a total of 34 sub-factors distributed across its three factors i.e., game design (3 sub-factors), gameplay (23 sub-factors), and players’ subjective perspectives (8 sub-factors). This study contributes to the fields of games user research, smartphone games, and player experience through analysis of reasonably large number of player reviews from a significant sample of smartphone games. Further, this work lays the groundwork for more specialized and in-depth research in smartphone gaming domain, thereby deepening our understanding of playability and player experience of smartphone games as well as advancing the notion for a platform-centric game design.