Not Doing But Thinking: The Role of Challenge in the Gamming Experience.

 The aim of this Article was to present the observations and results of the impact of altering the level of challenge on the user experience when they played video games.

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