Attitudes to new technology and experiential dimensions of two different digital games Heikki Särkelä*, Jari Takatalo*, Jeppe Komulainen*, Göte Nyman*, Jukka Häkkinen# *University of Helsinki Department of Psychology P.O. Box 9, 00014 Helsingin yliopisto, Finland heikki.sarkela@helsinki.fi #Nokia Research Center Audio-Visual Systems Laboratory P.O. Box 407, 00180 Helsinki, Finland ABSTRACT This paper describes the effect of attitudes to new technology on user experience in two different digital games. User experience is measured by using a framework which includes perceptual-attentive, cognitive-emotional and motivational constructs. They form four experiential dimensions; Physical presence, Emotional involvement, Situational involvement and Performance competence. Attitudes to new technology were measured by asking from the subjects how interested in new technology they were. Two types of computer games were played in two different displays. The results show the dependence of experiential dimensions on subjects attitudes towards new technology. Attitudes to new technology modify the expectations and beliefs, hence the motivation of the user. The results have relevance especially when considering the optimal target group of marketing computer games. Author Keywords attitudes, experience, presence, involvement, computer games ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m Computer games and experience INTRODUCTION Human experience is subjective by nature making it difficult for other people to fully comprehend the content of others subjective experience. Hence it is a reasonable approach to examine it through subjective judgement of the experience. To understand the holistic human experience one should consider both bottom-up processes, such as direct perception [1], and top-down processes, which affect the way we experience the surrounding world [2]. For example, playing a computer game is essentially different for someone who plays it on a daily basis as contrasted to someone who experiences a computer game for the first time. Furthermore, playing a computer game with head mounted display (HMD) is experienced differently if one is generally interested in novel technology when compared to people who do not value such gadgets at all. The aim of this study was to examine these differences. Presence Recent advances in technology have brought us new devices, such as HMDs and virtual environments (VEs) which enable us to experience sense of presence more easily than traditional media. Sense of presence has significant effects on the experience which makes it important concept when trying to develop products that people would be eager to use. Presence can be defined as a perceptual illusion of non- mediation, which means a state in which a person fails to notice the devices from which the actual stimuli originates [3]. The person feels that instead of e.g. playing a computer game with a gamepad, he/she is actually driving a car, as if he/she would be inside the game world. Presence has two main elements that determine it: 1) the characteristics of the user and 2) the characteristics of the media [4]. Presence has been studied extensively but very little attention has been paid to the background variables which affect it. It is not clear which user characteristics are essential in producing the sense of presence and how susceptible presence is to variation of background variables. Attitudes to new technology Great deal of research has been done on explaining what makes new technology appealing and causes people to adopt it. A main finding is that beliefs about usefulness of new technology have a mediating role on attitudes and behavioral intentions to use new technology [5]. Furthermore, attitudes on new technology seem to modify the overall user experience. In this study, the effect was seen especially on presence, as described below. Naturally, attitudes on new technology affect mainly the motivation of the user, through which it modulates the user experience. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. NordiCHI '04, October 23-27, 2004 Tampere, Finland Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-857-1/04/10... $5.00 349