Videogames is a huge and popular industry
all around the world. The success of this industry directly depends of the
experiences that the people have with games and how they get engaged in them. However,
the big question designing games is what are exactly those experiences. This
study is focused on the role of challenge in game experience.
Understanding the concepts surrounding
challenge in game experience is important in order to understand the
experiment. In the first place, Immersion, the sense of being involved in the
game to exclusion of the world around with consequences as dissociation from
the real world, a loss of sense of time, and a high degree of cognitive and
emotional involvement.
The next concept is challenge. It can be described
as the player’s perception of difficulty, and it can be achieved in terms of
pushing the gamer’s to physical limits (interaction speed and the action
accuracy) or cognitive limits (problem solving skill required in the game). The
level of challenge experienced in the game is related with the immersion
achieved by the gamer.
The last concept used in this study is expertise
and the role of expertise in immersion. This is the skill level of the gamer. The
aim of this experiment is to investigate the relation between expertise and
challenge and its impact in the game immersion. In other words, for example if
the gamer finds the level of challenge too high in proportion with their
skills, the gamer will experience anxiety, while, if the gamer has very high
skills and the game is not challenging enough, the gamer will experience
boredom, and consequently, immersion will be harder to achieve.
Overall, the research was conducted
through two experiments; the objective of the first experiment was to
investigate the effect of the speed of interaction on immersion. In this, the
level of activity required to play the game was manipulated, and two variables
were measured, the relative amount of effort required playing the game (low
effort and high effort) as the independent variable and the participant
perception of immersion calculated through an Immersive Experience
Questionnaire (IEQ) as the dependent variable. Also the effect of expertise was
taken into account dividing the group of players according to the prior
experience with the game. The game played was Tower Defense (try to stop
enemies from crossing the defined path).
As a result of this first experiments, the
major conclusions are that the variation of the effort while the game difficulty
remains constant does not have a significant impact on the immerse experience
and once the gamers are immerse, low experience players experimented the high
effort and low effort conditions equally, while those players with a higher
expertise level were less immerse in the high effort condition than the low
effort condition, meaning that playing faster was frustrating for them because
the increasing speed impacted negatively their ability to apply their
strategies.
The second experiment was conducted to
investigate the effect of time pressure on immersion. The idea was to
manipulate the level of cognitive challenge and make the gamer play and think
faster in order to stay in the game and maintain the immersion. In this case, the independent variable was
the level of challenge (with time pressure and without time pressure) and
dependent variable was the participant perception of immersion questionnaire
(IEQ). The game played was Bejeweled (tile-matching puzzle) in the two modes,
simple (no time pressure) and timed (with timer pressure). The players were
divided in two groups based on the prior experience with the game. One group
plays the simple version and the other played the timed version. The result was that the players with the time
pressure condition had much higher immersion that the group with no time
pressure, this means that the cognitive challenge had an impact on the game
experience.
In the last experiment, the expertise
factor was included in the equation; it means the objective was to investigate
the interaction between the time pressure and the expertise on the immersion.
The game played in this experiment was Tetris, and two groups were conformed,
experts and novices. The challenge was
determined based on the level of the participant in the game if the participant
was at a higher level, then the game became more challenging. The hypothesis in
this case was that the experts would be more immersed playing at higher levels
and boredom at lower levels, while novices would be more immerse at lower
levels and in a state of anxiety when at higher levels. The independent
variable used in this experiment was the level challenge (low level or high
level), the between subject variable was the level of expertise (expert and
novice) and the dependent variable was the participant perception of immersion
questionnaire (IEQ). As a result of this final experiment experts were more
immerse playing at higher level than playing at lower level and novices were
more immerse playing at lower than higher level. In this case we saw how the
expertise and challenge relation had a significant impact leading to the
immersion.
As final point the role of challenge
leads to a positive game experience, but it has to be related with the
expertise of the players.
Reference
Anna Cox, Paul Cairns, Pari Shah, and
Michael Carroll. 2012. Not doing but thinking: the role of challenge in the
gaming experience. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems (CHI '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 79-88.
DOI=10.1145/2207676.2207689
