Narrative as a Game User Experience Dimension: An Experimental Study (original) (raw)

International Series on Computer Entertainment and Media Technology

The concept of user experience is the subjective relationship between the user and the application, with special emphasis on interaction. Accordingly, the concept of player experience is the subjective relationship between the player and the game, again with special emphasis on interaction but the interactive nature of digital games necessitates different methods to analyze user experience since the player is not merely an interactor but an active participant that shapes his/her own experience with his/her actions and choices. In this regard, modeling player experience is a diverse field of research. Wiemeyer et al. (2016) divided psychological models of player experience into two, general models that have been developed for a wide range of application areas including gaming and domain-specific models that have been developed especially for gaming. The general psychological models are Self-Determination Theory (SDT) of Ryan and Deci (2000), the Flow model of Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (2002), Attention, Relevance, Confidence, Satisfaction (ARCS) model of Keller (1987), and the various presence/immersion studies in literature. These generic models were developed for other fields of study and although there were attempts to apply them to gaming, narrative is not an individual dimension of player experience in any of them. SDT was extended and applied to gaming with the Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS) model (Ryan et al. 2006) and the three dimensions of player experience are: PENS in-game autonomy, PENS in-game competence, PENS ingame relatedness. Flow model has been modified by Sweetser and Wyeth (2005) as GameFlow and consists of eight elements: concentration, challenge, skills, control,