Background. Engagement has been identified as a crucial component of learning in games research. However, the conceptualization and operationalization of engagement vary widely in the literature. Many valuable approaches illuminate ways in which presence, flow, arousal, participation, and other concepts constitute or contribute to engagement. However, few studies examine multiple conceptualizations of engagement in the same project.Method. This article discusses the results of two experiments that measure engagement in five different ways: survey self-report, content analyses of player videos, electro-dermal activity, mouse movements, and game click logs. We examine the relationships among these measures and assess how they are affected by the technical characteristics of a 30-minute, custom-built, educational Downloaded from game: use of a customized character, level of narrative complexity, and level of art complexity.Results. We found that the five measures of engagement correlated in limited ways, and that they revealed substantially different relationships with game characteristics. We conclude that engagement as a construct is more complex than is captured in any of these measures individually and that using multiple methods to assess engagement can illuminate aspects of engagement not detectable by a single method of measurement.Research on engagement has taken many forms and been assessed in many ways; however, few studies examine multiple measures of engagement simultaneously. Questions in the literature remain about whether different measures capture distinct aspects of engagement. To understand how different measures relate to each other and to determine whether and which elements of the stimuli affect engagement, we conducted two experiments that measure engagement when playing a computer-based video game in five different ways: survey self-report, attention to the stimulus, electrodermal activity (EDA; previously known as Galvanic Skin Response), mouse movements, and game click logs. We first examine the relationships among these measures, then we analyze which characteristics of an educational game best promote engagement: use of a customized character, level of narrative complexity, and level of art complexity. We found the game manipulations had little to no reliable effect on our various engagement measures. We found evidence, however, to suggest that different measures to assess engagement reveal important player differences that are inaccessible with a single measure approach.
Conceptualizations and Measures of EngagementEngagement with media and games has been defined in many ways, including as involvement (Jennifer Stromer-Galley (PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2002) is an associate professor in information studies. Her expertise is on communication processes and effects through digital communication channels. She has more than 30 publications that focus on dimensions of digital media around influence, leadership, political communication, and training. Contact: jstromer@syr.edu. Ben Clegg i...
