RIESGOS AL COMPONENTE ABIÓTICO______________________________________ 17 1. Derrames de sustancias peligrosas ________________________________________ 17

This question was aimed at collecting participants’ opinions about how knowing about the adaptation could have affected their experience, and whether it would have been better to be unaware of this feature.

Generally, based on the players’ own interpretation of the adapta- Partial Standard

tion, some of them thought that if they were not aware of the adapta- tion their game play could have been less intense. Participants thought

they felt more focused and motivated to do well, because they were told about the adaptation.

There were also some players, who thought that knowing about the changes did not affect their experience of the game, mostly because they did not pay much attention to the timer. Moreover, players who were not paying attention to the timer attempted at guessing how the changes to the timer could affect their gaming experience. These play- ers thought they would concentrate more, if they saw the countdown speeding up.

The majority of the players did not think that their experience was

Full Standard

in any way altered based on the knowledge about the timer. Many of them pointed out that the timer was only a secondary feature in the game, which players tend not to pay much attention to unless needed. Therefore, it is not surprising that not many players paid much atten- tion to it while focusing more on the game itself.

Some players also found it difficult to make assumptions about how different their experience could have been, because they did not no- tice the timer at all. They mentioned that if the timer was flashing or changing in size, the changes would have been more obvious.

Additionally, a few players made an assumption that they would experience less pressure if they did not know about this feature. One participant did not see this feature as beneficial, and assumed that without this knowledge they would judge their performance in the game based on their skills, rather than it being “handicapped” by the adaptation.

Again, more players knowing full details about the adaptation thought

Partial Adaptive

that this information made them feel more in suspense, and if they did not know about it, their experience could have been somewhat differ- ent. Players’ predictions ranged from assumptions that they would feel calmer without knowing about it, to statements that the lack of this in- formation would lead them to experience more stress.

However, some players were not convinced that their experience was in any way affected by the knowledge of the adaptation. Moreover, some of them stated that their experience came from playing the game, and was not affected by the length of time they spent playing it.

Most players in the adaptive condition, who knew about the de-

Full Adaptive

tails about this adaptive timer, noticed that being told about the timer changed their strategy in a way, and their experience as a result of that. Players mentioned that knowing that the timer was linked to their

game play made them actively seek action rather than being more de- fensive, feel more nervous, but have a more enjoyable experience over- all. Players also assumed they would be more frustrated if they did not know about the changes in the timer, particularly if they noticed it changing and would not know why.

Participants playing in this condition were also sceptical about the influence of the knowledge on their experience, because they felt that the timer was not their primary focus, and therefore it did not have an effect on their gaming experience.

8.9

Discussion

This chapter presents a study, which evaluated the effect of the pres- ence of an adaptation in the game on immersion, based on players’

awareness and understanding of the feature. Overall, the results sup- Being aware of

the adaptation leads to higher immersion

port the hypothesis that the amount of information that the player knows about the adaptive technology in the game affects their immer- sion regardless of whether the game contains this feature or not. The

results found in this study replicate the findings inChapter 6, which

demonstrated that those players who engaged with a game without an adaptive AI were more immersed when believing that the game is changing based on their performance than the players who were not aware of such ‘adaptation’ or when they believed it was not present.

In Chapter 6, players were not provided the full detail about what adaptive AI did in order to avoid confirmation bias. However, it was evident that players who were unfamiliar with the concept were more likely to feel more immersed in the game than those players who were not lured into it by the novelty. Therefore, an assumption was made that if the players knew the full details about mechanics behind the adaptation, they might feel less immersed. This could be either due to the perceived fairness of the feature or simply because fuller un- derstanding of the mechanics may decrease the novelty effect or pro- innovation bias. Similarly, players who are only aware of the presence of this potentially beneficial feature would have more room for inter- pretation, and would generally perceive it more positively due to this.

The data obtained in this study shows that this was not the case: Immersion

increases with more detailed information about the adaptation

players felt more immersed when knowing about what adaptive timer did than the other participants who were either unaware of this feature or were just simply told that the game had an adaptive timer without the explanation of what it did. Participants’ comments collected at the

end of the experiment allowed us to gain more insight into this: in More detailed information about the adaptation changes players’ tactics in the game

some cases, players evidently used the information about the adap- tation to their advantage, i.e. some of them tried to incorporate the feature into their gameplay by trying to extend the time and beat as many zombie toys as possible. This is also reflected in the scores of the players: participants who were aware of the timer adaptation scored significantly higher than the players who were not told about it. Sim- ilarly, although not many players did so, some of them kept the track of the timer by looking at it, which they would not necessarily do oth- erwise, according to their responses. It is possible that the increase in their cognitive involvement was due to their increased focus on the timer.

Alternatively, players who were only aware of the adaptive timer being present in the game without the detailed explanation of its func- tionality believed it was somewhat beneficial for their experience. How- ever, due to the lack of knowledge about what the timer was doing, players concentrated more on the main gameplay rather than the timer. The realisation that it was continuously adjusting the challenge in the game was something that players were aware of, but did not actively think about during their game play.

An additional goal of the study was to explore the effect of the pres-

The adaptive timer has a positive effect on immersion

ence of the adaptive timer on immersion of players. The adaptive timer has already proved itself to be beneficial to player experience, as seen inChapter 7, and the findings in this study also confirmed this hypoth- esis. Overall, players felt more immersed when the timer was changing its countdown rate based on their performance in the game regardless of whether the players knew about it or not.

These findings support the idea of adaptive features having a posi- tive effect on gaming experience: the idea of having an adaptive timer was to match the challenge in the game to the players’ skills. There- fore, the weaker players, who were somewhat disadvantaged in ob- taining the required goal of 300 points, had more time to achieve this goal because of the presence of adaptation. Overall then, players who knew about this assistance perceived this feature as fair. While players

Players perceived the adaptation as fair regardless of their performance in the game

who were more experienced had the ability to achieve the 300 points goal without the help from the game. With the implemented adapta- tion, players felt moderately challenged, however they were not able to score much higher than the weaker players. Interestingly though,

contrary to the findings from (Cechanowicz et al.,2014; Gerling et al.,

2014) the stronger players did not perceive this feature as limiting. This

against the clock, there were no other players that they could com- pare their performance against. Therefore, as seen in the comments of the participants, players felt they enjoyed themselves while play- ing the game – more time pressure did not have a negative effect on their experience of the game. The implementation of the adaptation was aimed to increase challenge, and not to deprive players from their abilities to obtain high scores. That explains why the stronger players did not feel disadvantaged in the game.

The implemented timer adaptation provided an effective balance be- The adaptive

timer balanced the challenge to players’ skills effectively

tween the in-game challenge and the skills of the players, which is supported by results of the challenge component of immersion. The perceived challenge did not differ significantly between players with different expertise levels, and the qualitative data collected at the end of the study also provides an additional support for the claim that players felt moderately challenged.

Interestingly though, in terms of perceived challenge, players did Perceived

challenge is not affected by the adaptation

not differ significantly when playing with the adaptive timer or when having the standard countdown. This can be attributed to the fact that players did not pay direct attention to the timer, as it was not a part of the primary gameplay. Players mostly experienced the challenge in the game through the mechanics of shooting zombie toys and avoid- ing getting hit at the same time, while the time pressure could have indirectly affected their perception of challenge.

The presence of the adaptive timer did have an effect on the players’ scores: those players who experienced the adaptation achieved scores, which were more tightly clustered around the goal, as one might ex- pect. While the participants who experienced the game for exactly 90 seconds without any variation in countdown rate had much larger spread of their scores. The mediation analysis, however, demonstrated that despite the adaptation having an effect on the in-game scores and

the immersion levels, the effect of the presence of the adaptive timer The effect of

adaptation on immersion was not moderated by the in-game scores

on immersion was not mediated by the scores players achieved in the game. This means that immersion in the game was not directly de- pendent on the in-game scores, although, interestingly, the players’ achievement of the goal had a significant effect on their immersive ex- periences. This is an interesting discovery, while not entirely intuitive: the scores were largely perceived as arbitrary numbers by the players because they could not compare them to any other players’ scores or

to their own, which meant that the immersive experience was not af- Achieving the

goal increases immersion

fected by these numbers. However, being able to achieve the goal made players feel more immersed as a result of this achievement.

There was a positive relationship between one’ ability to achieve the goal and the amount of time they spent playing the game. In the stan- dard condition, players with varied levels of expertise had the same amount of time to achieve the goal, which explains the large variation in the scores they obtained. While the adaptive timer provided weaker players with more time – this meant that weaker players could achieve higher scores than they typically would, while stronger players expe-

The effect of adaptation on immersion was not moderated by the perceived expertise of players

rienced more challenge in the form of time pressure while their ability to perform well in the game was unaffected. Nonetheless, the effect of adaptation on immersion was not moderated by the players’ perceived level of expertise, as there was no interaction effect between the two independent variables on immersion scores.

Interestingly, there was no interaction effect if the presence of adap- tive timer and the information players knew about it on their immer-

Awareness of the adaptation increases immersion regardless of the presence of the feature

sion in the game. As the amount of detail players received about the adaptation increased, so did the the immersion level of players, how- ever, this was not dependent on whether the game contained the adap- tive timer or not. The presence of the adaptation affected immersion positively regardless of the information precision, and the effect of in- formation was not linked to the effect of adaptation – players felt more immersed when knowing more precise information about the adapta- tion regardless of whether it was present in the game or not.

Additionally, the component analysis of immersive experience us- ing the IEQ suggested that the presence of the adaptive timer had a somewhat different effect on immersion than the information players knew about it. Being aware of the adaptation had a significant effect on the cognitive involvement of players and their levels of dissociation from the real world, while having the adaptive timer affected almost immersion in a more broad sense – all components apart from the perceived level of challenge. Participants’ comments suggest that the players who were aware of the adaptation, particularly the players in the ‘full info’ condition, changed their tactics according to this knowl- edge of the game timer adapting to their game play. This potentially increased the cognitive involvement of the players, leading to more focus on the game as opposed to the real world surroundings.

Overall, however, this study has several limitations. The adaptation

Limitations of the

study _{used in this study was not a conventional method of balancing the}

difficulty in the game – changing the time players have in order to complete a goal based on their performance throughout the game is not entirely something many players would expect from the game with

regards to the adaptive gameplay. Usually, games adapt the number of enemies in the game, their strength and abilities, as well as the number and values of collectible objects, which means that the players’ interaction with the game has a direct effect on the adaptation and can be more obvious to the naked eye. As the timer was only a part of the user interface, players were not focused on this feature as much as they were concentrated on the game mechanics of shooting and running. Additionally, as players could not directly affect the effect of the adaptation, many of them deliberately did not pay attention to the timer, as seen in their comments.

Moreover, as the gameplay was somewhat repetitive, it is possible that the players’ generally positive perception of the adaptation could change with longer play, as the players’ interest in the game would de- crease with time. Therefore, longer gaming sessions should be used to evaluate whether the effect of players’ perception of the adaptation is durable. Moreover, as players engage with the game for longer periods of time, the effect of information about the adaptation could weaken or become overwritten by the effect the game itself has on their gaming experiences.

8.10

Conclusions

The data collected in this study provides additional supporting evi- dence that players feel more immersed in a digital game when know- ing that it contains adaptive technology. These findings are on a par

with the results obtained in Chapter 6. Moreover, this study demon-

strated that players feel more immersed in a game when knowing more detail about the adaptation, which, according to the participants’ comments and the scores they obtained in the game, tends to affect the way they perceive the game and act inside it. Players who knew about the adaptation achieved higher scores in the game than the players in the standard condition, regardless of whether the adaptive timer was slowing down or speeding up the countdown for the players.

The results also suggest that this effect of players’ knowledge about the adaptation is not dependent on the presence of it in the game – players feel more immersed knowing that the game contains this adaptive feature regardless of whether they have a chance to experi- ence it or not. This effect, however, becomes more enhanced with the presence of the adaptive feature, in this case an adaptive timer.

The adaptation, implemented in this study, influences the amount of time players engage with the game for, which affects the scores players are able to achieve within the gaming session. However, the scores players achieved in the game do not mediate the effect of the presence of the adaptive timer on their immersion. i.e. stronger players who achieved higher scores did not not feel less or more immersed in the game than the players with lower scores. Moreover, the effect of the adaptation on immersion was not moderated by players’ perceived levels of gaming expertise.

The adaptive timer is, however, only one kind of adaptation, which is not a typical adaptation used in digital games. More often, digital games adapt the number and the quality of enemies based on players’ performance. While the timer adaptation is a feature that many players did not pay much attention to due to it not being the main mechanic, based on their comments, the more commonly used techniques, such as enemy adaptation, could elicit a different effect. As players directly interact with the NPCs in the game, the adaptation might become more noticeable, which might impact their experience.

Another constraint of the experiment is the duration of the manipu- lation. Playing for 1.5 minutes might not be enough time for players to properly experience the adaptation. As players make progress in the game, their attitude toward the adaptation might change – the initial boost they experience from knowing that that game has adaptive tech- nology might wear off, and the effect of the actual adaptation would take over their experience. Moreover, as they play for longer, this kind