Behaviour, realism and immersion in games

Immersion is recognised as an important element of good games. However, it is not always clear what is meant by immersion. Earlier work has identified possible barriers to immersion including a lack of coherence between different aspects of the game. Building on this work, we designed an experiment to examine people's expectations of how a game should behave and what would happen if that behaviour was deliberately made to be incoherent. The idea then is to understand immersion through seeing how immersion can be broken. The main manipulation was to alter the behaviour and realism of the graphics in the course of a simple game situation. Surprisingly, results indicated that participants could be so immersed within a simple environment such that even significant changes in behaviour had little effect on the level of immersion. In some cases, the attempted disruptions went completely unnoticed. These results suggest that immersion within an application can overcome effects which are completely against user expectations.