Current Issue
Immersion in videogames - 15 August 2008
by Paul Cairns
Read this article in Chinese (translated by Xiaohong Yu, proofread by Christina Li)
User experience is a term that is widely used these days to refer to all sorts of
interactions between people and technologies. But when it comes to videogames, experience is the only sensible word to use. Games are pure experience. And the range of experiences they offer is huge from what it is like to land a 747 at Heathrow Airport to slaying space dragons with a team of like-minded warriors. Thus, when it comes to really understanding user experience in games, it can be hard to say anything that would apply in general. However, one expression that does seem to crop up regularly, and that gamers relate to, is that games are immersive: when people are having a good experience, they get lost or immersed in the game and the world outside the game fades into the background. So what is this notion of immersion? What causes it? And is it the heart of what makes a good game? These are the questions that I have been trying to answer, together with my colleagues and students, over the last few years.
Superficially, it seems every gamer knows what you mean when you say a game is immersive. But what does it imply to be immersed? And are all games immersive all the time? To answer these questions, Emily Brown [1] interviewed gamers about the games they liked to play and then analysed what they said about immersion. It seemed from this study that immersion was a graded experience: some games are more immersive than others and sometimes the immersive experience was more intense than other times. In fact, it seemed that full immersion, where a gamer was completely lost in the game, was only a fleeting experience that lasted for short, intense periods. The game could still be immersive at other times but just not so utterly and entirely absorbing.
It seemed immersion was built on things like a loss of sense of time, losing awareness of your surroundings and becoming emotionally involved in the game and these different factors could vary independently for different playing occasions. We used these ideas to develop a questionnaire to measure immersion. That is, people could play a game and then fill out the questionnaire to tell us about their experience in terms of the different factors we were interested in. The problem with questionnaires is that you can never be sure what you are really measuring. To help us with this, our questionnaire finishes with a simple question: on a scale of 1 to 10, how immersed did you feel? Whenever we’ve used this questionnaire in our work, it seems we really are measuring immersion because we always get a high correlation between the general score on the questionnaire and the final immersion rating.
To get a better view on how the questionnaire worked and what it was measuring, we conducted a large-scale online survey using it [2]. We got 243 responses to our online survey. From the factor analysis of the data, it really does seem that the questionnaire is measuring one big idea that we could sensibly call immersion. And underlying immersion are five components which seem to breakdown into two groups. The first group is the person components: real world dissociation, emotional involvement and cognitive involvement. These components are how the game affects a person’s thoughts, attention and feelings. The second group is the game components of control and challenge. These are the things that the game can offer in order to make it immersive.
Now, if you are familiar with the concept of flow [3], it may seem that immersion is the same thing. Flow is all about enjoying activities where you reach “the zone” when you are acting and thinking in perfect harmony to produce this optimal experience. Attributes of a flow experience are things like being challenged, being involved and losing your sense of time. Is immersion just another word for flow? Actually, no. Flow is, if you like, the extreme end of immersion and is argued for as the highest psychological state of enjoyment. Immersion is necessary for flow but you can have a happy and satisfying immersion experience without getting in to flow. For example, you could imagine playing a game whilst waiting for a lecture or a television programme to start. You are not completely lost to the world because you are keeping an eye on the clock but you are also quite immersed in the game you are playing. This could not be flow because the activity does not absorb and satisfy your whole mental process but it is a fairly immersive experience. If you like, where flow is the psychology of optimal experience, immersion is the psychology of suboptimal experience.
Given that we feel we can now reliably measure immersion, there are two questions that I would really like to explore next. The first comes from thinking about the variation that occurs between people. It is clear that different people experience different levels of immersion in different games. This is in part just due to preference but is it possible that some people just simply don’t get immersed? Or, turned around to be a bit more positive, does everyone have some game that makes them immersed? Early work done by Mathilda Nathan suggests that there is a fascinating interaction between your ability to be imaginative and daydream and your ability to become immersed. In particular, if you are good at daydreaming but don’t like a game, not only do you not get immersed but you get less immersed than someone who is less good at daydreaming. So personality does play a part in immersion but we are a long way from getting a clear picture of how that works.
The second question that interests me is whether we can measure immersion without using a questionnaire and even better, can we measure changes in immersion as people play a game? As you can imagine, using a questionnaire to answer this would definitely disturb the game play and how immersive it is. But perhaps using eyetracking or physiological measures, it may be possible to see how immersed a person is. With this, we might be able to see what it is about games that makes them immersive and how events in the game trigger immersion or cause people to stop being immersed. This has two potential benefits. First we might be able to design games to be more immersive and secondly, we might be able to provide nonimmersive interludes in game to interrupt immersion and to avoid people becoming too addicted to their games. But these ideas are a long way off and we have a lot of work to do to get there.
References
- Brown, E. and Cairns, P. (2004) A grounded investigation of immersion in
games. ACM Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2004,
ACM Press, 1297-1300 - Jennett, C., Cox, A., Cairns, P. et al (in press) Measuring and defining the
experience of immersion in games. To appear in Int. Journal of Human-
Computer Studies - Czikszentmihalyi, M (1994) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
SOS Free Stock
Dr Paul Cairns is a senior lecturer in human-computer interaction in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York. He is programme leader for a brand new MSc in Human-centred Interactive Technologies which will be starting in October, 2008. He has been lecturing and researching in HCI for nearly ten years and has a particular interest in the experience of playing videogames but is also interested in using statistics and statistical model to better understand how people work with computers. He really likes gardening and his favourite flower is the daffodil.
Comments made
Possible Related Articles:
Latest Comments