In The Feels: How Vibes Can Guide Us To Better Gaming Experiences
Nordic Game presents a special message from Gameopedia:
By Frode Krisner, Co-CEO and Founder, Gameopedia
Conventional wisdom says: give the people what they want. And that’s true — with a caveat. First, you need to know what people want.
In 1985, Coca Cola introduced “New Coke”, with a revised formula whose flavour profile was sweeter and more closely matched their biggest rival, Pepsi. At the time, Coke was losing market share to Pepsi and assumed that what their customers wanted was a matter of taste. But the backlash and quick reintroduction of “Coca Cola Classic” revealed that what their customers really liked about Coca Cola was that it was a classic. It reminded them of childhood treats, carefree summer days, the association with Americana, or maybe simply the colour red, which studies have shown is the color that elicits the strongest emotional reaction.
It was never about the taste, but feelings, memories, and brand associations.
This story’s been told a thousand times. “New Coke” is a case study and cautionary tale that’s often summarised to, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But there’s another lesson here: emotions matter.
And if you’re looking at competitors or thinking about how to stand out, sometimes it’s smarter to segment your market not by genre or demographic, but by emotional resonance.
Virtual Experiences, Real Emotions
One of gaming’s biggest differentiators from traditional passive media like film or music is its unique ability to put you in the moment. Unlike a movie, where you follow the protagonist, in a game, YOU ARE the protagonist.
I can’t dunk or pull off a bicycle kick in real life. But my NBA 2K or EA Sports FC avatar can. And when they do, I feel a sense of accomplishment as if I did it. That’s an experience passive media can’t replicate. These unique experiences can surpass the emotional impact of passive media because of the inherent interactivity embedded in the medium of gaming. You cannot be a participant or observer in the game — unless that’s the intended mechanic, like in Call of Duty’s infamous “No Russian” mission, but even that moment of passivity is a deliberate statement loaded with meaning.
The result is an intense rush of emotionally-driven experiences that keeps players coming back. We may rewatch films or replay songs, but these engagement numbers pale in comparison to the total time invested by game players on their favourite work of interactive media.
Facts and Feelings
Hot take: Genres don’t really exist. They were invented to help consumers find media similar to what they already enjoy. But genre classification failed to take into account why people liked something in the first place: how it made them feel.
Take The Last of Us and Resident Evil. Both are technically action-adventure games where you shoot zombies in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But the range of emotions both games evoke cannot be more different.
Meanwhile, based on surface-level segmentation, there’s nothing in common between Stardew Valley and Euro Truck Simulator 2. The former’s a whimsical farming game set in a fantasy world with cartoonish visuals, while the latter’s a hyper-realistic long-haul driving simulator. But emotionally, they have a lot more in common. Whether you spend a few hours crafting tools in the countryside or ensuring your cargo arrives in Dusseldorf on time, both games offer a soothing escape from the chaos of real life. You emerge from both experiences feeling calm, relaxed, even serene.
The elements of each game differ, but the emotional resonances can help developers identify how these vastly different elements can engender a vibe that brought both games so much success that even years after their release, they feature tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of concurrent active players.
Intelligent Insights for Emotional Resonance
To tap into what really resonates with players, you’d need to sift through over 100,000 games to isolate key features and systematically organize them using a friendly interface.
And if that sounds like a lot of work, good news! It’s already done.
Lumos, powered by Gameopedia, is a cloud-based gaming intelligence platform that allows you to discover what truly makes your game resonate with your audience. With over 30 million data points, curated by human analysts (with help from machine learning), Lumos offers the industry’s most comprehensive collection of feature-level analysis that can be turned into actionable cues for game development and marketing.
Lumos gives devs and marketers something that’s already becoming invaluable: authenticity. It helps you look past surface-level genre tags and build something that actually connects.
To learn more about Lumos and get a free demo, visit www.asklumos.com
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