Immersion, Flow and Usability in video games

Immersion, Flow and Usability in video games

Immersion, Flow and Usability in video games

By Raphael Leroy

Abstract

“Context: Nowadays, video games look and feel increasingly realistic, and provide engaging and immersive experiences to players. Understanding what makes games so appealing and immersive is important to grasp in order to provide better experiences.

Objectives: To provide a better understanding of the concepts of flow, immersion and usability in video games and understand how usability interact with these different concepts.

Method: 20 participants took part in user tests and answered a survey about usability and immersion.

Results: Usability had a positive effect on immersion which was fully mediated by appeal. Learnability was correlated with absorption by activity, and usability was correlated with fluency of performance.

Conclusions: Usability and appeal are both contributing to the feeling of immersion which in turn increases the general appreciation of the game. Immersion and flow are both relevant to understand players’ appreciation of the game.”

Reference

Leroy, R. (2021). Immersion, flow, and usability in video games. Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 483., 1-7. doi:10.1145/3411763.3451514 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3411763.3451514

Keyword

Video games, concepts of flow, immersion, gamification in business, research