Behaviour, realism and immersion in games

Abstract

Immersion is recognised as an important element of good games. However, it is not always clear what is meant by immersion. Earlier work has identified possible barriers to immersion including a lack of coherence between different aspects of the game.Building on this work, we designed an experiment to examine people's expectations of how a game should behave and what would happen if that behaviour was deliberately made to be incoherent. The idea then is to understand immersion through seeing how immersion can be broken. The main manipulation was to alter the behaviour and realism of the graphics in the course of a simple game situation.Surprisingly, results indicated that participants could be so immersed within a simple environment such that even significant changes in behaviour had little effect on the level of immersion. In some cases, the attempted disruptions went completely unnoticed.These results suggest that immersion within an application can overcome effects which are completely against user expectations.

Immersion in Movement-Based Interaction

“…Barriers to total immersion are a lack of empathy with game characters or a lack of feeling the atmosphere of the game. In a follow-up study [7], the stability of immersion is investigated. Here, the authors attempt to deliberately break the immersion of their test subjects and find that already low levels of immersion make subjects ignore drastic changes in the games behavior.…”

Engaging Visitors in Museums with Technology: Scales for the Measurement of Visitor and Multimedia Guide Experience

“…These factors are also discussed in work on cognitive absorption [6]. There are examples of measuring immersion, the feeling of being pulled into and becoming lost in the interaction with a piece of technology [7,8], and qualitative work in examining the engagement of visitors with interactive exhibits [9]. Finally, there is flow [10], the concept of optimal experience where a user experiences feelings of satisfaction and achievement when the experience is complete.…”

Going Beyond the Classic News Narrative Convention: The Background to and Challenges of Immersion in Journalism

“…But as research in the world of videogames has demonstrated, a certain degree of incoherence in the behavior of objects and things is admissible if immersion has previously been achieved (Cheng and Cairns, 2005). Or, put differently, if there is already a certain degree of immersion (for example, immersion in the story), this contributes to making up for other less successfully achieved aspects of perceptual realism.…”