Brukel vs Brukel: Impact of Game Fidelity on Player Experience in Gaminiscing Games

Chan, S., Cox, J., Ebrahimi, A., Lyman, B., & De Schutter, B. (2023). Brukel vs Brukel: Impact of Game Fidelity on Player Experience In Gaminiscing Games. 2023 IEEE Conference on Games (COG), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1109/CoG57401.2023.10333250

High-fidelity game development could be advantageous for improving player experience. However, it often comes at a price—labor costs, monetary investments, and lengthy development processes and it is challenging to balance between game fidelity and development cost. This work focuses on a specific genre—gaminiscing games, that are designed in a narrative way to archive and recreate personal oral history. Our study aims to explore the potential possibility of low-fidelity game design but without significantly, or even at all, sacrificing the player experience. Concretely, this paper explores whether a game design with higher fidelity and a specific type of scene would always correlate with a better player experience. An experiment with 42 participants was conducted using a commercial gaminiscing game called Brukel. Results show that it is not the case that both fidelity and scene would always significantly affect the overall experience of the game. This finding could shed light on practical game design, where game designers can choose the level of production that best aligns with their game’s objectives.