Assessing the Experience of Immersion in Electronic Games

Abstract

Despite the definition of immersion still being a source of controversy, it is generally accepted as a quality that turns experiences more appealing. Modern electronic games stand out as a notably immersive media, especially when the recent advances in consumer-level virtual reality hardware are taken into account. Development of immersive games requires not only a theoretical background usually found in literature but more practical guidelines for assisting developers to endow their experiences with actual immersion. In this paper, we investigate specific features that confer the quality of immersion to an electronic game based on the analysis of titles the audience consider as immersive. We developed a prototype of an immersive game based on these features. Comparative evaluation of our prototype and the selected titles suggests that six features were able to provide an immersive experience in games