Paper Reading #3 - Not Doing but Thinking: The Role of Challenge in the Gaming Experience

Intro:
     Title: Not Doing but Thinking: The Role of Challenge in the Gaming Experience
     Author Bios

1. Anna L. Cox
• University College London
• Research Interests: routine HCI tasks, Interruptions and interleaving, Understanding Cognitive and Social Aspects of gaming
• http://www.ucl.ac.uk/uclic/people/a_cox

1. Paul Cairns
• University of York
• Research Interests: the experience of playing video games and modelling user interaction
•  http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~pcairns/
2. Pari Shah - University College London
3. Michael Carroll - University of York

I couldn't find any confirmed correct information over Pari or Michael.

Summary:
Challenge has been shown to improve gaming experience for players, and the authors of this paper wanted to find out what constitutes a ''challenge." They wanted to know if it was cognitive or physical challenge that produced better gaming experience, which they measured by immersion into the game. They also wanted to know what part expertise played in the gaming experience. They designed and conducted three experiments to test these things.

Figure 1. Tower Defense Game [3]

The first experiment was designed to test both the affect of physical challenge (through increasing the number of towers needing to be placed moves to have the same affect) and player expertise in overall immersion levels. They used a tower defense game in this experiment. They had two game settings, one that was normal and one that caused an increase in steps without affecting the cognitive affect. The results show that the users with low experience felt the two games were equally challenging, while the more experienced users actually felt less challenged and less immersed in the game when playing the more physically challenging game. This seemed to show that physical effort isn't the only influence of challenge, and it is also showed that the increased steps didn't allow experienced players to use strategy as much, which resulted in less cognitive challenge, and hence decreased their immersion.

Figure 2. Bejeweled Game [4]

Experiment two wanted to look at how increasing time pressure to increase cognitive challenge would affect immersion. The players would play a timed version or a non timed version of the game Bejeweled. The results showed an increase in total immersion and in challenge in the timed version.

Figure 3. Tetris Game [5]

The third experiment was designed to show how time pressure and expertise worked together to affect immersion. The players were either a novice or expert and they played Tetris on either low-level 1 or high-level 6. The results showed that the novice players felt more challenged and immersed in the lower level while the experts felt more challenged and immersed in the higher level.







These three experiments showed that it is not enough to have a physically challenging game to produce immersion. The cognitive challenge is more important when trying to create immersion. The experiments also showed that challenge cannot be considered alone. The expertise of players matter because there must be a balance between skill and challenge for immersion to occur.

Related work not referenced in the paper:

1.  Affective videogames and Modes of Affective Gaming: Assist Me, Challenge Me, Emote Me 
•  http://comp.eprints.lancs.ac.uk/1057/
• This paper did a similar study, but it was only as a part of a much bigger one and not as detailed.
2. Pervasive Game Flow: Understanding Player Enjoyment in pervasive Gaming 
• http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1236238
• This paper discusses flow and enjoyment like the paper I read, but it is more specific ( flow in Pervasive Games)
3. Digital Game-based Learning: Towards an experiential gaming mode 
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1096751604000776
• This paper is talking about creating a game with immersion, but wants to incorporate education
4. A Gaming Approach to Learning Medical Microbiology: students' experience of flow 
• http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01421590701601550
• This paper also looks into creating flow, but for educational purposes
5. Online Flow Experiences, Problematic Internet Use and Internet Procrastination 
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563207001628
• This paper discusses flow, but in the context of how it affects procrastination problems
6. Content Creation Challenges and Flow Experience in Educational Games: The IT-Emperor Case
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1096751605000333
• Again, this paper discusses flow but in the context of educational games
7.  Re-Purposing Existing Generic Games and Simulations for E-Learning
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563206000963
• Yet again, this paper discusses how flow is affected by educational games
8. Playing Online Games: Flow Experience
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563206000963
• This paper discusses playing MUDs and how flow might contribute to the attractiveness of these games
9. An Integrated Design Flow in User Interface and Interaction for Enhancing Mobile AR gaming experiences
• http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5643296&tag=1
• This article discusses how AR can create an enjoyable user experience and flow if integrated well
10. Why Do  People Play on-line Games? An Extended TAM with Social Influences and Flw Experiences
• http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378720603001319
• This article focuses on how flow encourages game play.

There are many articles that discuss immersion/flow, but in a variety of context, mostly educational or online gaming. One article did discuss challenge, but only as a section of a much greater research plan. Overall, I do agree with the authors that an investigation into challenge and how it affects enjoyment is unique to them.No one else seemed to investigate what kind of challenges increase immersion in a game. Research seems to be mostly directed towards how immersion encourages game play.

Evaluation:
All three experiments used the Immerse Experience Questionnaire as an evaluation of how immersed they were when playing the game and how challenging it was. They also used a questionnaire to gauge expertise level on two of the experiments. The IEQ was quantitative and subjective because it produced a number result and it was based on how the player personally felt. The questionnaire to gauge expertise was qualitative and subjective because the player was determining their own expertise level and it classified them as either low or high expertise and didn't produce a number result. I thought the testing was a good evaluation, but the fact that the experiments occurred in different locations and involved different games, hurt the evaluation. This is because I feel it would affect the way you could compare and relate the results between the three. Also, the experiment was on about 20 people each time with an even amount of men and women. This is too small a number, but it was good they used both men and women.

Discussion:
I do not feel like this information is surprising. I have noticed it just in my everyday gaming experiences. Games where I have to think about how to solve puzzles to move on often give me an increase in enjoyment and causes more immersion (ex. Zelda games). I do feel that their choice of games (short computer games) was not a very good choice because these games are for very causal gamers, not the typical gamer. It was an interesting topic, but nothing too surprising came out of it.

Reference Information:
[1] Not doing but thinking: the role of challenge in the gaming experience: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2210000/2207689/p79-cox.pdf?ip=165.91.10.170&acc=ACTIVE%20SERVICE&CFID=151349081&CFTOKEN=89389542&__acm__=1346748873_90ef540954d19c6f1fd19f6356637515
[2] All papers listed were found using http://scholar.google.com/
[3] http://best-free-games-review.com/tetris-online/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bejeweled
[5] http://appstorebest.com/2009/03/22/sentinel/