On the Use of Presence Measurements to Evaluate Computer Games

As the game industry expresses a growing demand for effective evaluation methods, it is worth investigating if the commonly used questionnaires can be replaced by alternative ways of measuring user experience in interactive environments. This paper describes an experiment where an existing presence measurement method is modified for use in computer game development. 39 subjects were part of the experiment, which was designed to test applicability of the adapted presence measuring method. Besides playing a game prototype, test participants were asked to press a button when a visual signal, triggered by an in-game event, would appear on the screen in the periphery of sight. Noting how strong the signal was is assumed to infer how strong the stimuli had to be in order to break the immersive presence. The results indicated that the adapted method with observations from the test is more useful, than questionnaires, in determining immersive presence at certain events.