Decoding Game Art: A Review of Player-Centric Aesthetic Preferences in 3D Video Games

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-559-1_17How to use a DOI?

Keywords

3D video game; Game art styles; Visual aesthetics; Motivation and video games; graphic styles; player engagement

Abstract

Purpose: The primary objective of this research is to examine players’ preferences concerning visual aesthetics in 3D video games, including favored art styles, color schemes, and overall visual appeal. The secondary objective is to assist researchers and industry professionals in navigating the complexities of player engagement estimation, improving game art aesthetics in the competitive gaming world.

Methodology: The author discusses a number of earlier studies from 2010 to 2025 to investigate how visual aesthetics in 3D video games impact players’ engagement and enjoyment, which leads to game success. 70 journal articles and 15 conference papers are examined by the author. The author also gathered relevant information from reputable books and online gaming magazines. The author filtered articles to 60 and 10 conference papers by analysing their relevance and quality of studies. By synthesizing previous research, the author highlights the research gap, 3D graphics evolutions, trends and suggestions to improve 3d gaming quality in terms of visual aesthetics.

Results: The review demonstrates that visual aesthetic quality has an impact on overall user engagement and enjoyment, which varies significantly across conditions. The high visual quality 3d game interfaces are more enticing because of the bright and vibrant graphics, which keep users interested; the appearance and feel of the game features are regarded to be more user-friendly. The author adds more on 3d game art style and genre preferences among the players to choose the games.

Conclusions: An extensive literature study on video game art style and aesthetics revealed that the majority of research focuses on overall gaming experience, with very few studies addressing visual aesthetics. So some research should be conducted on visual aesthetics in 3d video games to analyze its impact on game success.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Naveen Kumar
AU  - Vinit Bihari
AU  - P. K. Parthasarathy
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/04/19
TI  - Decoding Game Art: A Review of Player-Centric Aesthetic Preferences in 3D Video Games
BT  - Proceedings of the Global Innovation and Technology Summit “AAROHAN 3.0”_HSS track (GITS-HSS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 241
EP  - 259
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-559-1_17
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-559-1_17
ID  - Kumar2026
ER  -