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There are numerous player questionnaires available for use. There is no agreed best practice on how these should be used and reported. The current work analyses 238 papers that use these questionnaires and why. There is an overall lack of transparency in the use and reporting of questionnaires. A checklist to help researchers transparently report questionnaires is provided.

Games provide a variety of experiences for players. Currently, research focuses either on games as undifferentiated wholes, or on a feature-level basis where findings are difficult to generalise. However, specific gaming experiences cannot be explained from these approaches. Open world games in particular are a popular game type known for giving players high levels of choice over what they do, thus enabling uniquely different experiences. Current approaches cannot capture what about this gaming experience players enjoy or why. To do so requires a ‘contextually-specific’ approach, demonstrated in this paper.