| Session Name: | Beyond Attention: The Player Involvement Model |
| Speaker(s): | Gordon Calleja |
| Company Name(s): | University of Malta/Mighty Box Games |
| Track / Format: | Design |
| Overview: | In his 2012 GDC talk, Richard Lemarchand highlighted the importance of understanding player attention in the design process. Attention is a prerequisite for other, more complex, forms of experience that occur during gameplay, but it only describes functional cognitive processes. It doesn't deal with the quality of experience, or the emotional and bodily aspects thereof. This talk gives a clear and straightforward outline of the basic layers of player experience. It starts with a brief overview of what attention is and how it functions. It then moves on to explain the nature of higher-order processes that follow directing one's attention to a game, by describing player involvement through a model Gordon has developed over several years of qualitative research. The talk ends with a consideration of the sense of inhabiting the game world and explains why immersion is the wrong metaphor to use to refer to this experience. |
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