The Influence of Controllers on Immersion in Mobile Games

The controls for digital games understandably have an im-portant part in building up the gaming experiences that peo-ple have. Whilst there is substantial work on innovative con-trollers for consoles, like the XBox Kinect, relatively little has been done to understand the effect of the different con-trol mechanisms that can be used to play games on mobile devices like smartphones. A well-defined framework of nat-uralness has emerged as potentially useful concept in area of game controllers. This paper reports two experiments that look at how the naturalness of the game controls influences the experience of immersion in mobile games. It seems that where there is an a prior natural mapping, this will improve immersion in the game but in the absence of a prior mapping, naturalness alone is not sufficient to account for immersion. This opens up the need for a more thorough investigation of this area. Author Keywords controllers; immersion; mobile games; natural mappings; gaming experienc