Synesthesia: A Study on Immersive Features of Electronic Games

Abstract

Immersion is a quality that turns user experiences more appealing, despite the definition of immersion itself still being a source of controversy. Modern electronic games became a well-established immersive media which already has a number of consumer-level virtual reality hardware and software available. Endowing a game with immersion requires not only theoretical background found in literature but more practical guidelines for assisting developers to glimpse possibilities and make design decisions. In this paper, we investigate specific features that bestow immersion to an electronic game. So, we first analyzed game titles the audience, the critics and developers themselves consider immersive in order to enumerate potentially immersive features found in these games. We then developed a potentially immersive game prototype based on these features. Results of a comparative evaluation of our prototype and the selected titles under different settings suggest that six features were able to provide an immersive experience.