The Jingle of Contrasting Constructs: Comparing Measures of Immersion and Challenge from the PXI and IEQ-SF

Player experience provides an important metric for both game developers and researchers to understand how players are interpreting the game and being affected by it. There are a high number of measures of player experience, with some focusing on an individual aspect and others attempting to provide a more comprehensive view of player experience as a whole. Whilst previous work has highlighted that some questionnaires are measuring similar concepts with different names, such as immersion and engagement, more work is needed to identify whether constructs with the same names from different measures are comparable in their results. The current work takes survey results from 138 players of League of Legends, and contrasts their scores on immersion and challenge from the Player Experience Inventory with those from the IEQ-SF. The results found that immersion from the PXI only strongly correlated with real-world dissociation, moderately correlated with involvement and did not correlate with challenge from the IEQ-SF. Furthermore, challenge from the PXI has a moderate correlation with involvement, but is not related to the other factors of the IEQ-SF. As such, these can be considered different concepts. These results demonstrate that, even for well-validated questionnaires, care should be taken to contrast results from different measures. Future development of tools should adopt naming conventions that make overlap and divergence with existing measures clear.