Exploring emotional experience and word-of-mouth mechanisms in male-oriented live-action interactive romance games: a mixed-methods empirical study

Live-action interactive romance games gained widespread popularity in 2023, but there remains a lack of mechanistic research on how male-oriented emotional experiences are generated and transformed into word-of-mouth and consumption intentions. Centering on the questions of “why preferences arise and how positive reviews are formed,” this study selects player reviews of four representative works across multiple platforms as samples. Combining content analysis, emotional quantification, LDA topic modeling, and netnography, it sorts out five key elements, emotional interaction, narrative, gendered bodily representation, technology, and others, and their operational paths, thereby constructing the corresponding relationship between evaluation and impact. The results show that, at the work level, the intensity of emotional interaction is largely consistent with the ranking of ratings. Notably, this consistency holds only at this level, while the correlation between comment categories and individual scores is weak at the comment level. Narrative has the second strongest impact; gendered bodily representation and technical topics do not form a stable positive driving force, but instead weaken word-of-mouth in some contexts due to objectification or performance disputes. The conclusions provide actionable references for optimizing the emotional mechanism of film-game integrated works, operating male audiences, and managing word-of-mouth, and offer insights for content design, community maintenance, and commercial transformation.