Factors underlying players’ evaluations of relationships between original and remade works

In video game play, it is important that players understand spaces and events as a single world with coherent meaning and organization. However, the cognitive dimensions players rely on to understand the game world remain unclear. This exploratory questionnaire-development and factor-structure study aimed to clarify the dimensions players use when comparing original video games with their remakes. Because remakes share a game world with their originals, examining players’ experiences of remakes provides a valuable opportunity to investigate which experiential aspects players regard as essential for perceiving a game world as a coherent whole. To address this issue, we developed candidate questionnaire items assessing both experiences of individual works and experiences arising from the relationship between an original game and its remake. Data were collected through two online survey studies with 343 participants in Study 1 and 926 participants in Study 2. Factor analyses suggested two factors of relationship-based evaluation—creative fidelity and cumulative criticism—and three factors of individual-work evaluation—original-specific experiences, remake-specific experiences, and social and real-world relevance. These findings suggest that evaluations of relationships between original and remade video games are shaped not only by narrative and surface-level similarities but also by how and to what extent players connect their past and present in-game experiences.