Hello~ Welcome back! In the last few weeks, I did research about Steam users as a discourse community. To analyze the Steam users community, I did document analysis about a review post of a video game, Stardew Valley, on Steam. Today, I am going to synthesis my document analysis results with outside resources, two peer-reviewed academic paper.
The document is a game review post and was written by a Steam user, called ErickaUnlimited. The tone of the review is casual and make me feel like ErickaUnlimited was very relaxed during playing the game (Wang, X.,2019). In the review, ErickaUnlimited (2016) described his own experience of playing Stardew Valley as “ It’s a chance to mellow out, play at your own pace and still enjoy everything the game has to offer.” ErickaUnlimited talked that, in Stardew Valley, players have all the freedom without mandatory tasks or time limits. Moreover, those words in ErickaUnlimited’s review also give me a sense of using Pathos. ErickaUnlimited drew a picture you feel that the future is on your hand. According to his expression, in Stardew Valley, the town is so beautiful, and people are so friendly. More importantly, you have this desirable life forever and forever. That is, Steam users are focused on their gaming experience and described their experience with great emotions. The paper, Extracting Usability and User Experience Information from Online User Reviews, analyzed the data of online reviews of video games (Hedegaard, S., & Simonsen, J. G., 2013, pp. 2089-2098). According to the paper, comparing to other online reviews, the video game reviews focus on the aspects of “Hedonic, Affect and emotion, Pleasure and Enjoyment and fun”. It concludes game reviews tend to use “word stems that are synonymous or antonyms to enjoyment and fun, describing respectively positive and negative experiences”. Same as the findings in the paper, the review post of ErickaUnlimited also has a lot of words that describe gaming experience and his emotions to the game. It implies that Steam users treat game experience and feeling as a very important thing. The good game experience is high-valued among the Steam users.
The review post is friendly and welcome. In the post, ErickaUnlimited had some casual paragraphs and wrote things that came into his mind immediately (Wang, X.,2019). It just like ErickaUnlimited was talking with his friends about Stardew Valley. To talking about game functions of Stardew Valley, ErickaUnlimited (2016) said “Sure, there are events to attend, festivals to see, men/women to romance and marry, kids to have, buildings to construct, fish to catch and weird little slimes to slay (Dragon Warrior, anyone?)” When talking about little slimes, ErickaUnlimited recalled another game Dragon Warrior, and he just followed up with asking “is there anyone who played the same game ?”. According to the paper, An Analysis of The Steam Community Network Evolution, Steam community is friendly and has casual degrees of members. Although there are many symbols in Steam that can be used to classify users such as user level and number of games owned, the research shows that the number of friends of a Steam users do not have a relationship of the number of games the users owned and the number of small discussion groups the users participated (Becker, R., Chernihov, Y., Shavitt, Y., & Zilberman, N., 2012, pp. 1-5). That is, users position and friendship in Steam are not influenced by their activeness in games. Thus, people in the Steam community is friendly and has a loose power structure.
That’s all for today. Have a nice weekend!
Reference
Becker, R., Chernihov, Y., Shavitt, Y., & Zilberman, N. (2012, November). An analysis of the steam community network evolution. In 2012 IEE
ErickaUnlimited. (Apr 5, 2016). Review of Stardew Valley. Retrieved from https://steamcommunity.com/id/ErickaUnlimited/recommended/413150/
Hedegaard, S., & Simonsen, J. G. (2013, April). Extracting usability and user experience information from online user reviews. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2089-2098). ACM.
Wang, X. (2019). Document Analysis. UC Davis UWP 001 course.
Little Candy House 