While video games used to be a leisure activity of a few “nerds,” they have now arrived at the center of the digitized global society: Over three billion (Newzoo, 2021) people worldwide play video games: On the PC, on the console, on the TV, and especially on the smartphone.

Video games are not just entertainment: they are meaningful on an individual and personal level, define identities – and thus form a culture of their own. The “gaming culture” is also becoming more and more diverse: The proportion of female and older gamers continues to increase. Those who played video games once in their youth often do so for the rest of their lives.

Video games are not just a leisure activity either: they are profoundly changing society, are seen as a field of experimentation for technologies and new forms of sociality, and combine ideas and technologies with passion and play. They are arenas for social progress and venues for political discourse. Without video games, the modern digitized world would not feel as playful, intuitive and motivating: Be it gamified and aesthetically adapted apps, social media platforms, software environments or various everyday applications. Gamification, Virtual & Augmented Reality are a key driver of social change.

The gaming experience is a multi-step procedure. On the one hand, gaming experience refers to a person’s subjective view of video games; on the other hand, it is socially formed, always changing, and influenced by a variety of interests, trends, and national-cultural origins. Every gaming experience should aim for the spark: a want to play, a readiness to play a game online with friends, and the anticipation of the next game.

A flame must be sparked in order to establish and maintain the interest in playing a game; this is the core difficulty that game developers faces today. The term “spark” can be used to describe the game experience and the curiosity that a game can elicit. The “Spark” is the foundation of the player-game relationship. The purpose of eye square Gaming UX Research is to investigate its qualities in a clear and practical manner.

eye square created a neurosemiotic model to describe the complexity of the gaming experience in a holistic and understandable way, as well as to ignite the spark. We approach the key questions of gaming in three steps:

• What game content do players perceive?
• How do they react emotionally while playing?
• And how do they evaluate their experience?

We combine market research and UX research experience with a self-active gaming squad, the Gaming Tribe. We blend psychological, sociological, philosophical, and computer science expertise with lifelong ethnographic gaming experiences of many gaming tribes’ particular gaming preferences: We blend ethnographic expertise from numerous gaming worlds with years of professional expertise, from the enthusiastic smartphone casual gamer to the PC gamer of 3D adventures to the 3D shooter aficionado on the Playstation.