Temporal presence variation in computer games

Abstract

Increasingly, the sophistication of modern computer-gaming systems is becoming comparable to that of immersive, virtual-reality (VR) environments, and the popular VR research topic of ""presence"" is currently being explored in the context of computer games. The explosion in popularity of networked gameplay and the movement of computing infrastructure onto the internet and the cloud, mean that technical anomalies such as network latency and dropouts may increasingly disrupt players' experience of presence. This thesis investigates how participants react to "Breaks in Presence" (BIPs) in terms of their impact on participants' levels of presence and time needed for participants to recover from BIPs with a networked, first-person-shooter (FPS) game. Four distinct BIP types, which were selected because of their practical significance and because of their relevance to an established model for presence, are tested. Analyses are then conducted on the effects of two contrasting game modes (a low-involvement 'navigation game' and a high-involvement 'combat game') as well as two game displays (an immersive VR theatre and a non-immersive PC monitor) on the perceptions of these BIPs. As part of the experimental procedure, a new video-cued-recall slider technique is introduced. This study shows that presence variations range continuously in their impact and in their recovery times (rather than being binary-state transitions) and participants experience different levels of impact and recovery from different BIPs. The findings show that perceptions of impact and recovery time behave differently and that, intriguingly, recovery time appears to be much more independent of game content and apparatus than impact is. There is evidence of strong carry-over effects in participants' recollections of the impact of BIPs from one game experience to the next. Results from the slider technique appear to show a good qualitative agreement with results from a post-experiment questionnaire.