Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A Method for Analyzing 3-D Video Games

By A. McMahan. 2013

363 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A recent shift in computer game design involves a move away from 2-D level design, in games like Prince of Persia (1992), or from isometric design in games like Warcraft, to 3-D design and a first-person point of view. This shift increases the sense of immersion by replicating the aesthetic approaches of first-person shooter games in other types of games, such as adventure games, role-playing games, and even strategy games, which previously used 2-D levels or isometric views. The shift in design is indicative of an overall trend to make desktop video games feel more like virtual reality. My approach here is to reexamine our concept of immersion in video games and suggest that immersion has become an excessively vague, all-inclusive concept. It is necessary to break down the concept of immersion into its more specific meanings and develop a more specific terminology. In this essay, I take the

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/df3d0a83ab7db85891451eb44be5e12f5ea53024

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Citations in the corpus

Learning in virtual reality: Effects on performance, emotion and engagement (2018, background): “2140 (page number not for citation purpose) (McMahan 2003).”
A visual analytics approach to understanding cycling behaviour (2012, neutral): “Immersion is a term that has gathered purchase in recent audiovisual scholarship, particularly in relation to videogames (Grimshaw 2007; Lipscomb 2004, McMahan 2003), yet it remains insufficiently explored and under-theorized.”
The Development and Validation of the Game User Experience Satisfaction Scale (GUESS) (2016, background): “This description, on the surface, sounds like the concept of immersion, which has led researchers to use the two terms interchangeably in the gaming literature (Ermi & Mäyrä, 2005; McMahan, 2003).”
Immersion revisited: A review of existing definitions of immersion and their relation to different theories of presence (2016, background): “An important difference is that the current taxonomy does not include immersion as a response to being enveloped by technology, that is, sensory immersion (Ermi & Mäyrä, 2005) or perceptual immersion (McMahan, 2003).”