The effects of juiciness in an action RPG [new study]

“A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it.”

When it comes to ‘Juiciness’ in Role Playing (Computer) Games, too much, or too little, it seems, can be non-ideal. Professor Dominic Kao and colleagues at the Virtual Futures Lab, Purdue University, US, have experimentally investigated such things – noting that :

“This is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest study to date on juiciness.”

:

“We created four versions of the same identical action RPG game*, but with differing levels of visual/audio effects: No Juiciness, Medium Juiciness, High Juiciness, and Extreme Juiciness. Overall, both Medium Juiciness and High Juiciness outperform No Juiciness and Extreme Juiciness across all measures.”

See: The effects of juiciness in an action RPG in Entertainment Computing, Volume 34, May 2020. (Also available in PDF format*)

* Note: The paper sports a number of examples of a linguistic construction called RAS syndrome* ( i.e. Redundant Acronym Syndrome, Syndrome ) with three references to “RPG game”* (i.e. ‘Role Playing Game, Game’).

Research research by Martin Gardiner