플레이타임에 따른 서사 중심 게임의 플레이어 경험 요소 분석: Disco Elysium Steam 영어 리뷰를 중심으로

초록

This study examines how player experience elements and recommendation judgments vary by playtime at the time of review in the narrative-centered game Disco Elysium. A total of 53,099 English Steam reviews were collected through the Steam API, and 42,878 valid reviews were used after preprocessing. The analysis focused on review text, recommendation status, and playtime at review. K-Means-based BERTopic was applied to classify the reviews into 25 topics. The results show that short-playtime reviews were mainly associated with boredom, slow pacing, save-related issues, and unexpected failure experiences. In contrast, reviews written after more than 10 hours of play emphasized worldbuilding, characters, dialogue, RPG/CRPG genre experience, and long-term positive evaluation. Recommended reviews were linked to artistic quality, narrative, worldbuilding, and character attachment, whereas non-recommended reviews were also associated with game-external issues related to production entities and rights relations. The high proportion of such topics in non-recommended reviews with over 60 hours of playtime suggests that Steam recommendation status may reflect a complex judgment combining game experience and external context. This study demonstrates that player experience in narrative-centered games is organized around different evaluative focuses over time.

키워드