Is Game Immersion Just Another Form of Selective Attention? An Empirical Investigation of Real World Dissociation in Computer Game Immersion

Abstract

When your daughter is playing video-games and you call her to dinner but she fails to respond, do you \nassume she heard you and ignored you? Everyday descriptions of game immersion suggest that the real \nworld dissociation experienced by gamers could be an extreme form of selective attention. If this were the \ncase, this would mean that your daughter really did not hear you call, due to the complexity of the game \nenvironment and a lack of available cognitive resources. \nThis thesis describes a grounded theory that suggests that immersion is a result of self-motivated \nattention which is enhanced through feedback from the game. Five experimental studies are then \ndescribed. The experimental studies show that the extent to which a player thinks they are doing well in \nthe game significantly affects their level of immersion, as measured via the Immersive Experience \nQuestionnaire; and has objective effects on their awareness of other things in the environment, namely \nrecall of auditory distracters and reaction time to a visual distracter. \nTogether the evidence suggests that immersion cannot be accounted for solely by selective \nattention: much of the real world is attenuated during game-play due primarily to the gamer’s motivation to \ncontinue the immersive experience. Interestingly, the auditory items that do get through the attenuation \nfilter and are heard by the gamer are those that are personal in some way; so if you used your daughter’s \nname when you called her, and she did not respond, then based on our findings one might suggest that she \nchose to ignore you in order to keep her sense of immersion. \nAdditionally, the final experiment shows a dissociation between immersion and cognitive load. \nThis suggests that the differences in immersion were not a result of increased sensory features or task \ndemands, but purely due to motivation.

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