Measuring and defining the experience of immersion in games

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Abstract

Despite the word's common usage by gamers and reviewers alike, it is still not clear what immersion means. This paper explores immersion further by investigating whether immersion can be defined quantitatively, describing three experiments in total. The first experiment investigated participants’ abilities to switch from an immersive to a non-immersive task. The second experiment investigated whether there were changes in participants’ eye movements during an immersive task. The third experiment investigated the effect of an externally imposed pace of interaction on immersion and affective measures (state anxiety, positive affect, negative affect). Overall the findings suggest that immersion can be measured subjectively (through questionnaires) as well as objectively (task completion time, eye movements). Furthermore, immersion is not only viewed as a positive experience: negative emotions and uneasiness (i.e. anxiety) also run high.

Introduction

Computer games are actively enjoyed by millions of people around the world. Progressing greatly from the early graphics of Pong and Space Invaders in the 1970s, modern games often have huge virtual environments for people to explore. Controls are more sophisticated, allowing people to carry out a wider variety of manoeuvres in a game. Through the use of the internet people can even play against opponents who are thousands of miles away.

However despite these differences in game design and appearance, successful computer games all have one important element in common: they have an ability to draw people in. Providing an appealing distraction from everyday worries and concerns, computer games allow people to “lose” themselves in the world of the game. Sometimes people find the game so engaging that they do not notice things around them, such as the amount of time that has passed, or another person calling their name. At such moments, almost all of their attention is focused on the game, even to the extent that some people describe themselves as being “in the game.”

This experience is referred to as “immersion”, a term used by gamers and reviewers alike. Immersion is often viewed as critical to game enjoyment, immersion being the outcome of a good gaming experience. However, although there seems to be a broad understanding of immersion in the gaming community, it is still not clear what exactly is meant by immersion and what is causing it.

In an attempt to understand immersion further, Brown and Cairns (2004) conducted a qualitative study in which they interviewed seven gamers and asked them to talk about their experiences playing computer games. As intuitive as the word suggests, the resulting grounded theory found that immersion is indeed used to describe the degree of involvement with a computer game. The theory also identified a number of barriers that could limit the degree of involvement. These barriers arose from a combination of human, computer and contextual factors (e.g. gamer preference, game construction, environmental distracters), and the type of barrier suggested different levels of immersion.

In total, three distinct levels of immersion were identified. The first level of immersion was dubbed “engagement”. To enter this level the gamer needed to overcome the barrier of gamer preference. The gamer needed to invest time, effort and attention in learning how to play the game and getting to grips with the controls.

From engagement the gamer may be able to become further involved with the game and enter the second level of immersion, dubbed “engrossment”, by overcoming the barrier of game construction. Game features needed to combine in such a way that the gamer's emotions were directly affected by the game and the controls became “invisible”. The gamer is now less aware of their surroundings and less self-aware than previously:

A Zen-like state where your hands just seem to know what to do, and your mind just seems to carry on with the story (Brown and Cairns, 2004).

From engrossment the gamer may be able to become further involved with the game, by overcoming the barriers of empathy and atmosphere, and enter the highest level of immersion, dubbed “total immersion”. In total immersion gamers described a sense of presence, being cut off from reality to such an extent that the game was all that mattered.

When you stop thinking about the fact that you’re playing a computer game and you’re just in a computer (Brown and Cairns, 2004).

Total immersion required the highest level of attention and was a rare and rather fleeting experience when gaming, whereas engagement and engrossment were more likely to occur.

In another qualitative study, Haywood and Cairns (2005) considered children's engagement in an interactive museum exhibit. The key features of engagement identified were participation, narrative and co-presence of others. These first two suggest that, in non-game applications such as museum exhibits, people will be able to become immersed if there were some basic progressive structure that allowed the user to apply their own ideas in understanding the interactive system. Being grounded theories, the attributes of immersion identified by the studies are descriptive rather than predictive but nonetheless provide a sound basis for our research. These broad findings indicate that immersion has the following features:

  • Lack of awareness of time.

  • Loss of awareness of the real world.

  • Involvement and a sense of being in the task environment.

Section snippets

Immersion and engaging experiences

The notion of absorbing and engaging experiences is not a new concept and there are several other concepts that have a relation to immersion that have already been considered. The three main ideas used widely to describe engaging experiences are flow, cognitive absorption and presence. However, we argue here that immersion is clearly distinct from these established concepts and a better understanding of immersion would be crucial in understanding the relationship between people and videogames.

Research questions

Given that gamers are able to identify immersion for themselves, yet the concept is rather under-defined, one aim of this paper is to consider player's subjective experiences of immersion, and develop an immersion questionnaire combining aspects of flow, CA and presence. By including a single question measure of immersion rating (i.e. rate how immersed you felt from 1 to 10) as well as a multiple question measure of immersion (a mixture of questions combining aspects of flow, CA and presence)

Questionnaire development

The questionnaire is developed from findings of previous studies into the related areas of flow, CA and presence. Included are Agarwal and Karahana's (2000) five dimensions of CA: temporal dissociation; focused immersion; heightened enjoyment; control; curiosity. However, unlike the standard CA questions, the immersion questions relate to the particular experience of the given task rather than general experience of using software. These dimensions take a different approach to studies that focus

Background of the experiment

Designing an intervention to reduce excessive game play, Eggen et al. (2003) created a physical agent that draws the player's attention away from the screen and invites the player to a non-keyboard physical interaction. They formulated the success of their intervention in terms of action space. When the player is immersed, his or her attention is focused upon the action space that is related to the game (i.e. the screen and the keyboard actions logically connected to it). Therefore if the

Participants

Forty participants, all students from a London University, took part in this study. They had an average age of 21 (SD=3.51), ranging from 18 to 36 years. Ten were male and thirty female.

Computer game and control task

In the experimental condition participants played Half Life, a 3-dimensional first person shooter game on a Dell Inspiron Laptop. Fig. 1 shows a typical view that a player would see whilst playing. Participants first played the “hazard training course” which required players to train their character through a

Results

All statistical analyses were performed using SPSS 11.0. The immersion scores were calculated based on 0 for a strongly disagree to an immersion question and 4 for strongly agree. This was also adjusted appropriately for the positive or negative versions of the questions. As predicted in the first hypothesis, the experimental mean was higher than the control mean: 69.6 and 52.5, respectively (and corresponding standard deviations of 18.2 and 17.2). As there was no requirement on the immersion

Discussion

The hypothesis, that the level of immersion in playing the game would be higher than the level of immersion in the control activity, was supported. The immersion score obtained in the experimental condition was significantly higher compared to that of the control condition. The questionnaire was generally successful in obtaining an immersion score, and demonstrated normal distributions in the level of immersion reached in either of the two conditions. Therefore, one can conclude that as a first

Background of the experiment

The human gaze reveals information about the user's intention and attention, providing a porthole into his/her current cognitive processes (Toet, 2006). As a result eye tracking has become an increasingly popular methodology for measuring attention, and with recent developments in technology it is becoming increasingly reliable too. In the past eye tracking has been used to analyse how people read, perceive scenery, artwork, and films (Duchowski, 2003). Recently, eye tracking has also been used

Design

The experiment was an independent measures design. Participants completed one of two tasks: a non-immersive task (simple graphics, clicking boxes) or an immersive task (complex graphics, exploring a virtual environment). In both tasks eye tracking was used to explore how the participants’ eye movements changed during the task (i.e. the number of fixations, fixation duration). The participants’ level of self-reported immersion was also measured.

Participants

Overall 41 participants took part in the study, 21

Overview of results

Statistical analyses were performed using SPSS 11.0. As well as analysing eye gaze data trends within the conditions, we thought it would also be informative to compare the eye gaze data of participants that scored highest on immersion and participants that scored lowest on immersion, in a short qualitative analysis. Therefore results will be presented in the following order: eye gaze data trends within conditions, subjective immersion ratings, and qualitative analysis.

Eye gaze data trends within conditions

When analysing the mean

Discussion

The hypothesis, that the level of immersion in the immersive condition would be higher than the level of immersion in the non-immersive condition, was supported. The immersion scores obtained in the immersive condition (both multiple and single question measures) were significantly higher compared to that of the control condition. Therefore like Experiment 1 again it would appear that the immersion questionnaire developed was a successful indicator of immersion, and people can reliably reflect

Further refinement of the questionnaire

In Experiments 1 and 2 the mixture of negative and positive wording of questions was found to be confusing to participants at times. Therefore a new questionnaire was developed with simpler wording.

The questionnaire was divided into six sections in total. The first three sections were concerned with varying degrees of attention to the task: basic attention (e.g. To what extent did you feel you were focused on the game?), temporal dissociation (e.g. To what extent did you lose track of time?),

Background of the experiment

In this experiment we decided to investigate the effect of a person's pace of interaction with the computer interface. The motivation behind this research direction comes from the findings of Experiment 2, in which researchers were surprised to find that some participants actually rated the supposedly non-immersive task as highly immersive. We suspect this result could be due to the pace of the non-immersive task itself. Being self-paced, this meant that as soon as the participant clicked one

Participants

There were thirty-six participants in total, nine in each condition. The majority of participants were university students, recruited through an opportunity sample. In terms of gender, 19 were female (52.8%) and 17 were male (47.2%). Ages ranged from 17 to 42 years, the mean age being 24.6 years.

State questionnaires

The State Anxiety Questionnaire (Spielberger et al., 1970) was used to measure state anxiety. It consisted of 20 statements (e.g. “I felt calm”) and asked participants to rate on a scale from 1 to 5 how

Results

All statistical analyses were performed using SPSS 11.0. The mean immersion, state anxiety, positive and negative affect experienced by participants in the four pace conditions are shown in Table 1.

The increasing pace condition had the highest mean immersion score, followed by the fast condition, the slow condition, and then the self-paced condition last of all. The non-parametric Jonkheere-Terpstra test was used to investigate the directional hypothesis for immersion: θ Slow<θ Self-Paced<θ

Discussion

The hypothesis, that participants in the four speed conditions would vary in terms of the amount of immersion they experienced, was not supported. Although the increasing pace condition did have the highest mean immersion score (as expected) the mean differences between the four pace conditions were not significant.

We suspect that the lack of significance is largely due to the game not being “game-like” enough. Even in the increasing pace condition, although the task had some qualities we

Summary of findings

In this paper we have discussed a number of issues in defining and measuring immersion, and we have reported the findings of three experiments investigating these issues. Immersion is a concept which we argue is important to gaming, transcending existing cognitive theories of flow, CA and presence. Immersion is an experience in one moment in time and graded (i.e. engagement, engrossment, total immersion). Immersion involves a lack of awareness of time, a loss of awareness of the real world,

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the UCL Interaction Centre for supporting Charlene Jennett during this project. We would also like to thank Bunnyfoot Behavioural Research Consultancy for their cooperation and support.

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