Paper #3 : Not Doing But Thinking: The Role of Challenge in the Gaming Experience

Summary
    In this paper, various doctorates from around England ( York and London ) study Gaming Experiences and what factors make them. They study Immersion which has several layers, but the one they are most interested in is "Total Immersion". They study challenge, in which they believe the most immersive games challenge a player both cognitively and physically. Expertise, trying to find the level of challenge appropriate for the players skill level.  When considering these factors the researchers divided a series of experiments with varying levels and types of challenge.

   They set up a tower defense game in which players either played a "High Effort" or "Low Effort" version of the game. They then measured several objective and subjective quantitative measures. They also then ran another experiment which measured the effect of time pressures on the player. 

Related Work not Referenced in Paper

For related works I found papers which focused on Video Games and Challenge or Immersion I got results such as

• Sex Differences in Video Game Play: A Communication-Based Explanation

• Mortal Kombat (tm): The Effects of Violent Videogame Play on Males’ Hostility and Cardiovascular Responding

• VIDEO GAME PLAYERS: PERSONALITY CHARACTERISTICS AND DEMOGRAPHIC VARIABLES

• Flow in Games (and Everything Else)

• Method of encouraging attention by correlating video game difficulty with attention level

• Immersion, Engagement, and Presence 

•  The development of the Game Engagement Questionnaire: A measure of engagement in video game-playing 

• VIDEO GAMES: PERSPECTIVE, POINT-OF-VIEW, AND IMMERSION

• A Motivational Model of Video Game Engagement

• Behaviour, Realism and Immersion in Games

For the most part I find alot of the video game studies revolve on the effect of the users in a non-video game related manner. For example The Mortal Kombat one focused on Male aggresion levels that result from Immersion within a video game. They don't seem to approach video games the same way this paper does.

Evaluation

    They took alot of quantitative data such as immersion levels, time survived, etc. The paper is loaded with graphs and numbers. Some of it was taken based on the players surveys and alot of it is recorded by the game. 

Discussion

    I think it's cool that they're studying what makes video games fun and immersive. It's a cool idea that there could be numerical guidelines that a game maker could follow to improve the quality of their game.