• Skip to main content
  • Skip to header left navigation
  • Skip to site footer
This website is moving.


  • Newsletters
  • About
  • Courses
  • Free Course Materials
    • Basic Intro to Game Design
    • How to Write CHI Papers
  • Log In
The Acagamic

The Acagamic

User Experience Research & Design in Games

You are here: Home / Publications / The Edge of Glory: The Relationship Between Metacritic Scores and Player Experience

The Edge of Glory: The Relationship Between Metacritic Scores and Player Experience

May 20, 2022 by

by Daniel Johnson, Christopher Watling, John Gardner, Lennart E Nacke
Abstract:
This study sought to examine how measures of player experience used in videogame research relate to Metacritic Professional and User scores. In total, 573 participants completed an online survey, where they responded the Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS) and the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ) in relation to their current favourite videogame. Correlations among the data indicate an overlap between the player experience constructs and the factors informing Metacritic scores. Additionally, differences emerged in the ways professionals and users appear to allocate game ratings. However, the data also provide clear evidence that Metacritic scores do not reflect the full complexity of player experience and may be misleading in some cases.
View PDF
Reference:
The Edge of Glory: The Relationship Between Metacritic Scores and Player Experience (Daniel Johnson, Christopher Watling, John Gardner, Lennart E Nacke), In Proceedings of CHI PLAY 2014, ACM, 2014.
Bibtex Entry:
@inproceedings{johnson2014edge,
abstract = {This study sought to examine how measures of player experience used in videogame research relate to Metacritic Professional and User scores. In total, 573 participants completed an online survey, where they responded the Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS) and the Game Experience Questionnaire (GEQ) in relation to their current favourite videogame. Correlations among the data indicate an overlap between the player experience constructs and the factors informing Metacritic scores. Additionally, differences emerged in the ways professionals and users appear to allocate game ratings. However, the data also provide clear evidence that Metacritic scores do not reflect the full complexity of player experience and may be misleading in some cases.},
address = {Toronto, ON, Canada},
author = {Johnson, Daniel and Watling, Christopher and Gardner, John and Nacke, Lennart E},
booktitle = {Proceedings of CHI PLAY 2014},
doi = {10.1145/2658537.2658694},
organization = {ACM},
pages = {141--150},
publisher = {ACM},
title = {{The Edge of Glory: The Relationship Between Metacritic Scores and Player Experience}},
url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2658694},
year = {2014}
}

The public part of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International LicenseCC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, all paid parts are copyright by Lennart Nacke · The Acagamic · Privacy Policy