Temporal Presence Variation in Immersive Computer Games

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 now being explored in the context of computer games. The explosion of popularity of networked gameplay and the movement of computing infrastructure on to the Internet and the cloud mean that technical anomalies such as network latency, dropouts, and so on, may increasingly disrupt players' experience of presence. In this article, a study of these "Breaks in Presence" (BIPs), which examines a networked, first-person-shooter game in an immersive virtual environment, is presented. Our study investigates how participants react to BIPs in terms of their impact on participants' levels of presence and in terms of the time needed for participants to recover from BIPs. Four distinct BIP types, which were selected because of their practical significance and because of their relevance to an established model for presence, were tested. The effects of two contrasting game modes (a low-involvement "navigation game" and a high-involvement "combat game") on the perceptions of these BIPs are analyzed. As part of our experimental procedure a new video-cued-recall slider technique is introduced.Our study shows that participants experience different levels of impact and recovery from BIPs and that the perceptions of impact of BIPs depend on the overall sense of presence as well as being task dependent. The article shows that recovery time seems to be a well-defined concept and that an overall measure of recovery time exhibits believable correlations with overall presence, with the overall number of BIPs (including "spontaneous" BIPs) and with user characteristics. The article also shows that the slider data for recovery time from BIPs provide evidence for a smooth variation of presence during an immersive experience. It is found that perceptions of impact and recovery time behave differently and that, intriguingly, recovery time appears to be much more independent of game mode than impact is. Evidence is found of strong carry-over effects in participants' recollections of the impact of BIPs from one game experience to the next is found. Results from our slider technique appear to show general agreement with results from a postexperiment questionnaire, and our study motivates the usefulness of our slider technique for future experiments.