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Fundamental Components of the Gameplay Experience: Analysing Immersion.
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This paper presents a gameplay experience model, assesses its potential as a tool for research and presents some directions for future work. The presented model was born from observations among game-playing children and their non-player parents, which directed us to have a closer look at the complex nature of gameplay experience. Our research led into a heuristic gameplay experience model that identifies some of the key components and processes that are relevant in the experience of gameplay, with a particular focus on immersion. The model includes three components: sensory, challenge-based and imaginative immersion (SCI-model). The classification was assessed with self-evaluation questionnaires filled in by informants who played different popular games. It was found that the gameplay experiences related to these games did indeed differ as expected in terms of the identified three immersion components.
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... Video gaming is not a monolith but is comprised of a variety of modes and styles of play that enable heroic study. Experiences of gameplay are also diffuse, each offering pleasure, fulfillment, and engagement through a range of immersive components (Ermi and Mäyrä 2011) and encouraging a range of player behaviors, including prosociality, in seeking those components (Lim 2019). Broadly speaking, there is a gradient of narrative and structure that goes between focused linearity on one end and broad openness on the other. ...
... Video game immersion refers to an assemblage of a player's thoughts, feelings, actions, and sense-making as key to the gameplay experience (Ermi and Mäyrä 2011). Alongside other definitions of immersion (Bouvier et al. 2014;Brown and Cairns 2004;Tu et al. 2022), Ermi and Mäyrä (2005) propose three elements of immersion: sensory (visual properties), challenge-based (skills and challenges), and imaginative (absorption in the narrative and identification with a character). ...
... Hence, immersion is often compared to a "flow" state (Csikszentmihalyi 1990;Michailidis et al. 2018) that one experiences when they are intensely focused on an activity, losing their perception of time, and gaining great gratification (Tu et al. 2022;Ermi and Mäyrä 2005). As Ermi and Mäyrä (2011) remark, digital games are excellent mediums for providing flow experiences, due to their interactive nature, and others have discussed how the intricacies of immersion consider audiovisual, ludic, emotional, spatial, narrative, and sensory elements in video gaming (see: Bowman 2018; Lankoski and Järvelä 2012;Michailidis et al. 2018;Ryan 1999;Ermi and Mäyrä 2011;Calleja 2007;Bouvier et al. 2014). ...
... ESGs based on IVR environments have the potential to create simulations of real or imaginary situations, allowing for a greater sense of player involvement and immersion. In the context of video games, immersion is understood as a phenomenon in which the player feels part of the experience as a whole [16]. The immersion is perceived similarly to the flow state described by [17]. ...
... The decision model IC seeks to implement a part of these mechanisms in the game scene, as well as use positive reinforcement (feedback) strategies to maximize player engagement. The objective is to stimulate the player to feel part of the experience as a whole, encompassing all his attention and corroborating the concept of immersion [16]. Figure 11 presents a simplified architecture of the immersion component. ...
Currently, the use of 360° videos combined with virtual reality (VR) techniques in the educational context has been considered a promising field of research. However, there is still a shortage not only of educational serious games (ESG) that implement such resources but also of models that can enhance the player’s experience and evaluate their performance. This work presents a decision model for SGE with 360° videos. The model was developed from artificial intelligence (AI) techniques with the aim of enhancing the player’s learning using immersion mechanisms and pedagogical reinforcement strategies based on the player’s experience and performance evaluation. The model was integrated into the SG The Mystery of Pandora to evaluate its efficiency. The game was evaluated with a sample of 52 participants aged between 13 and 63 ( M = 33.55 , SD = 12.14 ). The results showed adjustments made by the model in the final performance of the players based on their exploration in the 360° videos. Such adjustments allowed identifying players with learning difficulties and recommending pedagogical reinforcement to enhance learning. It was also possible to verify that players would win the game without the minimum knowledge expected about the subject if the decision model was not used.
... In the current game and gamification-related literature, a game or gameful experience has been considered as a multidimensional experience of the user's sensations, thoughts, feelings, and actions in a gameplay or game-like settings (Ermi and Mäyrä, 2005;Högberg et al., 2019). Psychological constructs such as immersion (Pasch et al., 2009), the immersive tendency (Witmer and Singer, 1998), presence (Takatalo et al., 2010), absorption (Eppmann et al., 2018), engagement (Brockmyer et al., 2009), skill and challenge (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975), flow experience (Cowley et al., 2008;Csikszentmihalyi, 1975), fun , enjoyment (Mekler et al., 2014), and sensory experience (Ermi and Mäyrä, 2005) have been often investigated; while among these measures, only scales including GAMEX (gameful experience scale, Eppmann et al., 2018), CEGEQ (Core Elements of the Gaming Experience, Calvillo-Gámez et al., 2010) and GEQ (Game Experience Questionnaire, Ijsselsteijn et al., 2008) aim to holistically describe the gaming-related experience. ...
... In the current game and gamification-related literature, a game or gameful experience has been considered as a multidimensional experience of the user's sensations, thoughts, feelings, and actions in a gameplay or game-like settings (Ermi and Mäyrä, 2005;Högberg et al., 2019). Psychological constructs such as immersion (Pasch et al., 2009), the immersive tendency (Witmer and Singer, 1998), presence (Takatalo et al., 2010), absorption (Eppmann et al., 2018), engagement (Brockmyer et al., 2009), skill and challenge (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975), flow experience (Cowley et al., 2008;Csikszentmihalyi, 1975), fun , enjoyment (Mekler et al., 2014), and sensory experience (Ermi and Mäyrä, 2005) have been often investigated; while among these measures, only scales including GAMEX (gameful experience scale, Eppmann et al., 2018), CEGEQ (Core Elements of the Gaming Experience, Calvillo-Gámez et al., 2010) and GEQ (Game Experience Questionnaire, Ijsselsteijn et al., 2008) aim to holistically describe the gaming-related experience. ...
... Sensory and perceptual immersion are closely related to technological immersion because both regard immersion as the subjective experience of an individual's senses enclosed by a technology-driven environment. According to these two definitions, immersion increases, for example, when "large screens close to the players' eyes and powerful sounds easily overpower the sensory information coming from the real world" [69] or when the physical world is hidden from users "by the use of goggles, headphones, gloves, and so on" [70]. The major difference between technological and sensory/perceptual immersion is that technological immersion objectively describes the technical configuration of a hardware device. ...
Interacting with virtual agents in immersive settings is becoming increasingly common thanks to the proliferation of dedicated media devices, such as consumer-grade virtual and augmented reality headsets. These technologies offer many advantages, e.g., in terms of presence and engagement, and can impact user behavior and attitudes toward virtual agents. Recognizing and understanding these effects is essential, especially in critical contexts involving the delegation of high-stake decisions to virtual agents. This article presents two experiments that explore users’ delegatory behavior toward virtual agents experienced via different media devices that vary in their technological immersion, i.e., a device’s technical capacity to deliver immersive experiences. The experiments’ results suggest that technological immersion is not a significant factor in users’ delegation decisions. Thus, for virtual agents designed to carry out critical tasks, developers may focus on other relevant factors, such as agents’ trustworthiness or performance.
... Results show that higher AR presence was associated with lower objective deviation scores in post-test. Presence is considered to be an essential contributor to total immersion [19,47] and is facilitated by multimedia features and game-based challenges [48]. Higher comfort with AR during training was also associated with lower deviation scores and a better approach quality in post-test. ...
Augmented reality (AR) could be a means for a more sustainable education of the next generation of pilots. This study aims to assess an AR-supported training concept for approach to landing, which is the riskiest phase of flying an aircraft and the most difficult to learn. The evaluation was conducted with 59 participants (28 women and 31 men) in a pretest–post-test control group design. No significant effect of the AR-supported training was observed when comparing the experimental and the control groups. However, the results show that for the experimental group that trained with AR, higher performance in post-test was associated with higher AR presence and comfort with AR during training. Although both gender groups improved their approach quality after training, the improvement was larger in women as compared to men. Trainees’ workload, fear of failure, and negative emotions decreased in post-test as compared to pre-test, but the decrease was significantly larger in women than in men. The experimental group who used AR support during training showed improved performance despite the absence of AR support in post-test. However, the AR-based training concept had a similar effect to conventional simulator training. Although more research is necessary to explore the training opportunities in AR and mixed reality, the results of this study indicate that such an application would be beneficial to bridge the gap between theoretical and practical instruction.
... Unlike other software, digital games often offer a unique experience that contains elements that are difficult to be evaluated. User experience in digital games can be influenced by many factors, such as flow [10,11], immersion [12,13], frustration or tension [14], psychological absorption [15], and social game context [16]. ...
User experience in digital games can be influenced by many factors such as flow [Csikszentmihalyi (Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. Harper Collins, 1990), Sweetser and Wyeth (Computers in Entertainment 3(3):1–24, 2005)], immersion [Brown and Cairns (ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2004, ACM Press, 2004), Ermi and Mayra (Proceedings of Chancing Views – Worlds in Play. Digital Games Research Association’s Second International Conference, 2005)], frustration or tension [Gilleade and Dix (Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology – ACE ’04, 2004)], psychological absorption [Funk et al. (Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Entertainment Computing Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, 2003)], and social game context [Bracken et al. (Online video games and gamers’ sensations of spatial, social, and copresence. FuturePlay 2005, 2005)]. Most of these factors should be present in a digital game in order to provide the optimal gaming experience [Kirginas (Contemporary Educational Technology 14(2):ep351, 2022), Kirginas et al. (International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction 28, 2021), Kirginas and Gouscos (The International Journal of Serious Games 4:53–69, 2017; International Journal of Serious Games 3:29–45, 2016)]. As there are many different game genres, sub-genres, and game types, user experience needs to be explored in more detail in research studies. This need is even greater when we talk about serious games. User experience is a multifactorial concept that is difficult to measure. This chapter aims to present a range of quantitative and qualitative/objective and subjective/short-term and long-term/formative and summative methods that can be used to evaluate users’ experience in serious games during and after the development process. It is also intended to provide insight into when the different user experience assessment methodologies should be employed in the development cycle.
This study is intended to support the Danish elementary school history classes in teaching pupils about the Bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807. The study included 22 pupils from two classes. One class with 11 pupils was included in the experimental study, which used a serious game to communicate the learning objectives of the topic. One class with 11 pupils served as the control group and used a more traditional approach with readings from the history textbook. The evaluation was based on a knowledge test with learning objectives from the curriculum. Additionally, the gaming engagement was evaluated in the experimental group through a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The game design was focused on intuitiveness, clear goals, and narrative engagement; which was revealed in the findings with the highest score from the gaming-engagement questions. Further, the results revealed higher understanding of specific learning objectives in the experimental gaming group compared to the control group. Previous research has the same findings, but there is a lack of improved suggestions for how to make the perfect match between game content and learning, as well as a lack of improved methods when evaluating games with children or early teens.
Virtual Reality (VR) and Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) are increasingly becoming employed in the classroom to facilitate embodied forms of experiential learning in sensorially rich contexts. This chapter presents the findings of a study conducted with 15-year-old students in a Singapore school. The study evaluated the effectiveness of IVEs as a novel pedagogical approach to the teaching of social and emotional competencies, in the context of Character and Citizenship Education; it sought to ascertain if the affordances of VR and IVEs—immersion, presence and embodiment—when accompanied by real-world narratives would facilitate greater empathy, perspective-taking and responsible decision-making. Students were divided into three treatment conditions: IVEs, “pen-and-paper” mental simulation and video-viewing, and each treatment contained a problem scenario that involved an ethical dilemma young people in Singapore today face. A quasi-experimental, pre-test post-test, non-equivalent group design was employed and the study adopted a mixed-method approach to data collection. The findings show how IVEs can effectively facilitate perspective-taking and empathy, and this is due to its ability to immerse the user in the fictional space of the narrative, thereby encouraging a deeper sense of presence and embodiment.KeywordsVirtual RealityImmersive Virtual EnvironmentSocial and Emotional LearningEmpathyPerspective-TakingResponsible Decision-Making
Gamification has been widely used in the higher education to enhance users' learning experiences through the integration of game-like elements into the course materials. This study explores whether and how different levels of gamification in the instructional methods will influence student engagement with the course, overall learning experiences with the course, and learning outcomes with the course materials. The findings suggest that, among four indices to measure the success of gamification, three out of four show the positive gamification effects with a highly gamified class leads to higher level of student engagement than no or lowly gamified classes. The same positive gamification effects can be found in students' overall learning experience. Highly gamified classes result in better student learning outcomes as measured by their grades at different data collection points. Limitations of this study include small class sizes and no statistically significant results and only two gamified elements used. Implications and discussions were presented.
In this paper we present the MDA framework (standing for Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics), developed and taught as part of the Game Design and Tuning Workshop at the Game Developers Conference, San Jose 2001-2004. MDA is a formal approach to understanding games – one which attempts to bridge the gap between game design and development, game criticism, and technical game research. We believe this methodology will clarify and strengthen the iterative processes of developers, scholars and researchers alike, making it easier for all parties to decompose, study and design a broad class of game designs and game artifacts.
Over the last 20 years repeated attempts have been made in HCI to put enjoyment into focus. However, it is only recently that the importance of enjoyment, even in serious applications, has been widely recognised by the HCI community. Typical of a relatively new area of investigation is the lack of an agreed set of terms: enjoyment, pleasure, fun and attraction are often used interchangeably. But do they really refer to the same experiences? Of course, in common speech pleasure, enjoyment and fun are almost synonymous and this is not an attempt to fix the language. None of these terms are reducible to single definitions but for the purposes of this chapter we will propose a difference between pleasure and fun in an attempt to delineate distinct forms of enjoyment.
Modern Fiction Studies 45.2 (1999) 553-556
The title of this book perhaps looks merely catchy but is cogent to its argument: that compelling narratives from antiquity to the present, whether classical or popular, are perennial, but that the medium of narration changes in time and new narrative opportunities appear with emerging technologies. Fans of Star Trek will recognize the "holodeck" in question as a "universal fantasy machine," allowing a living person to enter into a world of story as if it were 3-D reality. At present the holodeck exists only in fiction, but Janet Murray examines in detail the way narratives produced in digital formats have begun to simulate imaginary worlds in which one can become immersed as an agent who has the power to transform a course of action. The author optimistically predicts that an emerging cyberdrama "need not resemble Huxley 'feelies'," in Brave New World, but can offer "satisfactions continuous with those we receive from established narrative formats," and perhaps the originality we recognize as art. Arguing strongly against the view that newer forms of expression are intrinsically inferior to earlier ones -- that film is inferior to drama, for example -- she asserts that we have focused inappropriately on the worth of various media in the last quarter century when we should instead have acknowledged "a general crisis in meaning." Finally, Murray is not asking if Hamlet will play on the holodeck but if in cyberspace we can attain to an artistic truth equivalent to that achieved by Shakespeare on the Elizabethan stage.
Hamlet on the Holodeck takes a long view of the technologies of narrative, pre- and post-Gutenberg, paying particular attention to forms of storytelling that seem to anticipate and legitimate those emerging in cyberspace, for example, those that play with the border between fiction and reality, those requiring the active participation of an audience, or those offering alternative plotlines. Reminding us that books printed before 1501 are called "incunabula," from the Latin word for swaddling clothes, Murray sets the stage for a detailed discussion of largely experimental composition on the narrative computer, "a technology still in its infancy." At considerable length she examines storytelling in electronic games, such as Mortal Kombat, role-playing in virtual environments on the Internet called MUDs and MOOs, dialogue engendered by ELIZA and her daughters, computer programs capable of responding to simple typed questions, and interactive stories composed by Murray's own students at MIT.
It is a strength of this book that Murray, trained as a Victorian scholar and a teacher of humanities for many years, brings to her study of electronic composition an Aristotelian sense of analytic categories and writes about new media with great clarity. Less satisfactory to this reader is her antipathy to contemporary theorists whom she sums up inaccurately as "denouncing meaning as something to be deconstructed into absurdity." Aversion to much postmodern theory, together with a conviction that we stand in the "infancy" of electronic writing, leads to a slighting of sophisticated work by hypertext writer-theorists such as Michael Joyce and Stuart Moulthrop and somewhat overextended appreciation of such phenomena as electronic games and the authorship of chatterbots (computer-generated "characters" programmed to mimic speech, or at least certain verbal tics). Though computer-generated characters may at this moment appear merely fanciful, the aim of their creators is to achieve what computer scientists call "emergent behavior," the ability to go beyond what these characters have been programmed to do. At present still an "exciting possibility," machines that exhibit emergence will bring us, Murray believes, to "a new threshold in our ability to represent complex systems . . . whether thermodynamics, war strategies, or human behavior."
The imaginative artist of cyberspace narrative will be a "procedural author," one who, godlike, defines rules of action rather than determining behavior itself. Relying strongly on analogy with past success in narrative form, Murray argues that successful cybernarrative must establish its own conventions, "rules by which things should happen," and structures for...
How do you turn a great idea into a game design? What makes one design better than another? Why does a good design document matter, and how do you write one? This book answers these questions and stimulates your creativity!Game design consists of four essential tasks: imagining a game, defining the way that it works, describing its internal elements, and communicating this information to others. This book examines each of these tasks and shows you not only what issues you will need to address in your design, but how to think about games and gameplay. After reading this book, you will have the tools you need to both design many kinds of games and to create a professional-quality game design document.Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design will show you: The key design elements of every computer and video game, and how to think about them. How to write a high-concept document, a treatment, and a full design script. The essentials of user interface design and how to use them to define your game's look and feel. How to construct and balance your game's internal mechanics to make sure the game is both fun and fair. The relationship between interactivity and narrative, and how to write compelling stories. The unique design problems in each of the major game genres. How to design multi-player games to maximize player interaction and minimize cheating.
To summarise, this chapter has argued that although words like fun and pleasure are closely related and may each function
as a superordinate category for the other, there are experiential and cultural differences between them. Fun has been considered
in terms of distraction and pleasure in terms of absorption. This is not to suggest that pleasure is a more worthy pursuit
than fun, it is rather an attempt to delineate different but equally important aspects of enjoyment. It is possible to appreciate
Shakespeare and still acknowledge that The Simpsons is the greatest achievement of western civilisation. Both offer rich and fulfilling experiences but they are very different
kinds of pleasures. As Peter Wright and John McCarthy argue elsewhere in this book, it is not possible to design an experience,
only to design for an experience; but in order to do this it is necessary to have an understanding of that experience as it relates to and differs
from others.