Measuring Game Engagement

Background . Engagement has been identified as a crucial component of learning in games research. However, the conceptualization and operationalization of engagement vary widely in the literature. Many valuable approaches illuminate ways in which presence , flow , arousal , participation , and other concepts constitute or contribute to engagement. However, few studies examine multiple conceptualizations of engagement in the same project. Method . This article discusses the results of two experiments that measure engagement in five different ways: survey self-report , content analyses of player videos, electro-dermal activity, mouse movements, and game click logs. We examine the relationships among these measures and assess how they are affected by the technical characteristics of a 30-minute, custom-built, educational game: use of a customized character , level of narrative complexity , and level of art complexity . Results . We found that the five measures of engagement correlated in limited ways, and that they revealed substantially different relationships with game characteristics. We conclude that engagement as a construct is more complex than is captured in any of these measures individually and that using multiple methods to assess engagement can illuminate aspects of engagement not detectable by a single method of measurement.