The Relationship Between Game Narrative, Personality and Immersion

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A study was done by Kuang (2011) in order to analyze the relationship between game narrative, personality and immersion. He used the questionnaire method to analyze the relationship. He gathered 630 respondents by sending personal emails to disseminate the survey. The emails contained the website link, where the respondents could access the questionnaire. The survey had three sections that measured personality, past game experience and recent game experience. The NEO Five Factory Inventory was used to measure the personality of the respondents. In this questionnaire, the participant’s openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neurtocism would be measured. The questions for the past game experience would be mostly inquiring about their preffered type of games and other pastimes that are related to games. In the case of the questions for the recent game experience, some were inquiring about the games they have recently played and how immersed they were. The questions about immersion were taken from the Immersive Experience Questionnaire. The five factors that constitute immersion was also considered in the study. The five factors are cognitive involvement, real world dissociation, emotional involvement, difficulty and control. Cognitive involvement is how mentally engaged the player is with the game. Real world dissociation is how disengaged the person is while engaged in the immersive task. Emotional involvement is how affectively attached the person is to the task. Difficulty is how challenging the task seems for the person and control is the how much influence the person thinks he has over the outcome of the task. The data was analyzed using factor analysis and correlation. The study showed that personality tr... ... middle of paper ... ... a 15 minute break before they were reoriented with the same instructions. They were asked to play the game that they did not play in the last session for 45 minutes and had to answer the same questionnaires but thinking about the second game.They were then interviewed about their experience. A paired t-test was used to analyze the data gathered and results showed that there was no significant relationship between openness and immersion. After reconsidering their experiment, they found out that the two games they used may have been indistinguishable in terms of narrative, which may have caused the contradicting results. The two studies showed immersion can be affected by the personality of the player and it can affect the whole game experience. It was suggested by the researcher that more studies are done to analyze the relationship between personality and immersion.

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