Script:
Hello and welcome to my poster presentation studying the association between video game immersion, executive function and social presence in gaming.
Video games have become an increasingly prevalent part of our lives with numbers of gamers growing rapidly every year to stand at 2.69 billion in 2020 and the average time spent on games per week has risen from 5.1 to 6.5/week. The two graph I have on the right show the growing number of gamers as well the increasing value of the gaming industry every year
Growing advancements in game technology and graphics are able to better engage players and cause them to be more absorbed into their game. The state of entering this deeper level of focus is what we term a state of immersion and is known to have significant change in both cognitive and emotional levels of the players with regards to the situation they find themselves in in-game.
With the rapidly rising popularity of game and newfound associations between playing games and levels of cognitive functions, more research is needed to better understand this and our study is aimed at exploring cursory associations between game immersion and social presence due to the increasingly social nature of games as well as reaffirming previous literature’s findings on the relationship between cognitive function and video game immersion so as to help provide clearer direction for future research.
We have two main hypothesis for our current study which is
Participants with higher levels of video game immersion will correlate with higher score of the social presence as measured by the SPGQ due to social play increasing levels of social presence.
Participants with higher levels of video game immersion will also correlate with increased levels of executive functions as demonstrated by the Go/No Go Task and Alternate Task Switching Task due to video game immersion increasing focus.
For our methods, we recruited participants across multiple platform from academic ones such as SONA to social media platforms such as Instagram and Reddit. Popular platforms for gamers such as discord was also used to recruit participants.
We had no strict exclusion criteria except for a minimum age of 17, being fluent in English and memory and experience of having played a video game before.
Participants were then asked to complete a series of questionnaires on Social Presence in Gaming, Video Game Immersion on gorilla together with several cognitive tasks such as the Digit span task, Go/No Go task and the Alternate Task Switch task. The order of questionnaire and tests were randomised to make sure there was no order affects.
As this was part of a bigger study with other members, multiple other measures such as the Big Five Personality Index Imagination Scale and ADHD questionnaires were recorded as well but only the cognitive task scores, Social Presence in Gaming Questionnaire and immersion Questionnaire score will be focused on.
Our results showed significant but moderate positive correlations between video game immersion scores and social presence subscales when using a person correlation analysis.
The two scatter plots shown below are visualisations of the two significant correlation of Video game immersion with Empathy and Behavioural Involvement of the SPGQ.
This was contrasted by insignificant, weak and negative correlation between the video game immersion score and cognitive task scores of the Go/No Go task and Alternate Task switching.
The overall moderate and significant correlation between social presence in gaming and immersion could help show that social play and immersion increases feelings of social presence which was previously thought to be inversely correlated.
While the lack of significant correlation between video game immersion and executive functions run contrary to our hypothesis, it could help lend credit to other theories that posit that extreme levels of video game immersion or addiction could lead to reduced levels of executive functions such as sustained attention. This could be a possible explanation of why our hypothesis was not found as the lengthy cognitive task became detrimental to the focus of the participant and prevented them from answering it optimally.
Our study is limited due to a lack of control group as well as the inability to control for various genres of games. Past literature has focused on specific cognitive functions for different genres of games due to some executive functions being more well attuned than others such as attentional control and efficiency by gamers who tend to play action games.
The lack of an experimental design in our study also prevents us from assigning causality and direction and limits the interpretation we can have for our data.
In conclusion, our study has shown that increased game immersion correlates with increased social presence due to immersion increasing social play and that the negative direction of correlation between immersion and cognitive tasks highlights possible association of extreme game immersion or addiction being tied to deficits or reduction in cognitive functions and is a good direction for future research to look into.
Please can you describe the next research study that you recommend should be done
to follow up on the study that your poster reports?
I would recommend an experimental design focused on a specific genre of game as to better control for variables and also to target cognitive functions that are more attuned to said genre of game such as perceptual speed and attentional control in Real Time Strategy game players. That was there is less confounding variables and also the inclusion of a control group of non-gamers so that effects and direction can be isolated and attributed to the differing levels of video game immersion.
2. Which aspect(s) of your poster would you particularly like to receive feedback on?
I would like feedback on the discussion and understanding whether I am interpreting my results correctly and whether it is acceptable to extrapolate my results from the negative correlation results of video game immersion and cognitive task away from my original hypothesis and try to use another paper’s finding to justify this phenomenon and using it to guide future research.
Assessor 1 Comments (Grade Given 55):
In terms of your introduction, you did identify some of the background literature in relation to how common video gameplay is and what immersion is. However, more could’ve been said about the research that directly motivated your aims and hypotheses – as previous research looked at this? Also missing was some justification for why it’s important for us to know the answers to these questions – you talked about this briefly in terms of motivating future research, but why is it that we should know the answers in the first place?
Your method section shows a good understanding of the recruitment process and the survey itself. It was also good to see that you gave justification for why we did the randomisation of the measures. However, missing here was any information about participants that were recruited – on average how old were they? what was our gender distribution? There was also details about the questions we about the game play in general that were missing.
In terms of your results, correlations are appropriate test to use in terms of assessing your continuous variables, however there were a couple of things that were a bit unclear/you may want to re-look at for the summitted submission. Firstly, it’s always good to give some descriptive statistics – what were the averages/common things in terms of participants video game play? What were the means for our variables of interest? It also seems that you have excluded more than half of the participants because they didn’t complete certain aspects of the study even though as some of your correlations don’t include those aspects of the study – I would advise against this. Finally, just be careful in terms of your terminology – the phrase should be non-significant findings, not insignificant.
In your discussion, you did summarise the significant findings well and explain what they mean in terms of the research. However, there were two key issues: firstly, you interpreted the negative correlations that you found in terms of executive function, but as none of these were significant they really shouldn’t be interpreted – you wanted further guidance on this, and so I would suggest that you explore why the relationship is not significant – is it because a relationship doesn’t exist, or because of methodological issues? Secondly, you discussed how there might be an influence of the genre of game on executive function – we have the data to look at this, so this should be looked at.
In terms of the post itself this is clear and has an appropriate structure and most of the information is presented in an organised way. You had a nice use of figures in your introduction, and the scatterplots in the results section were nice, but could’ve been a bit larger. One other minor comment is that it would’ve been nice if there was some arrows are indication of the order of information, particularly in terms of where your aims and hypotheses are. The title of ‘conclusion’ is also smaller than the others.
Your oral presentation was nice, it was balance cross-section and was clear in most places. The only minor improvement I suggest is that your pace could’ve been a tiny bit slower. You have a nice idea for future research, which could be followed up in the discussion of your summative submission.
Assessor 2 Comments (Grade Given: 58):
well done for submitting this poster!
The poster’s strengths are evidenced in:
– A very clear and accurate description of the design and procedure.
– You also made good use of graphical elements like the graphs, which were also well labelled (Figures 1& 2 should have been referenced though!).
To improve:
– In your introduction, you explain the connection between presence and immersion well, but it would have been great if you could have also explain in more detail the background around the social play and executive functions. Those were introduced rather abruptly, yet are crucial and you also have hypotheses about them.
– You made good use of the graphical elements like the icons and graphs, but overall, avoid the white font colour for lack of contrast, aim for consistent font size and avoid wordy paragraphs on a poster.
– In terms of the structure of your poster, the boxes intuitively read top to bottom and left to right, but the order here seemes different. This is ok, but then I would have recommended that you kept throughout that wonderful verbal signposting which you did in the beginning for the Figures 1 & 2 (where you told the listener where on the poster to look).
– You had an overall good pace, but went over slightly the presentation, so I had to apply a slight deduction there.
– Your results section could have benefitted form more detail. For example, it is unclear if the assumptions for running Pearson’s correlations were met? How were the data processed/aggergated? And I also found it a bit difficult to follow which variables were ASRS subscales in the tables. The n0n-significant correlation should not have been intrepreted. You can discuss why there seems to not be an association, where you predicted one, but not go into discussing trends in the data.
Some things to think about going forward to writing your report: I recommend that you think about offering more background and set the relevance and importance of all variables early on. I also recommend giving more details about the data analysis (specifically the processing from the Gorilla raw data to aggregate scores) and not interpreting the non-significant findings.
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