Evaluating the Perceived Immersion of Procedurally Generated Game Levels

Abstract

Interactive Computer Games have grown in complexity as the game industry has matured into a multi-billion dollar market. As games have grown in complexity, the content that is produced for games has grown in both complexity and production cost. This has motivated research into Procedural Content Generation. It is generally thought that developments in Procedural Content Generation has the potential to reduce costs of content production in game development. However, currently Procedural Content Generation is primarily concerned with the playability and usability of generated content. There is little research that investigates the player’s perception of generated content. The goal of this research is to evaluate the perceived immersion of a game developed utilizing Procedural Content Generation. A game called Vektor was designed and implemented for this study. Two variants of the game were produced. One of those variants featured levels designed by a human designer. The other variant featured levels that were evolved using a genetic algorithm. The immersion scores of each variant was recorded from participants who played one of the game variants using a questionnaire. Statistical analysis was used to identify where significant differences in immersion occurred.