Dynamic Music and Immersion in the Action-Adventure:An Empirical Investigation.

Aiming to immerse players into a new realm of drama experience, a growing number of video games utilize interactive, ‘dynamic’ music that reacts adaptively to game events. Though little is known about the involved perceptual processes, the design rationale of enhanced immersive experiences is taken over by public discussion including scientific accounts, despite lacking empirical validation. The present paper intends to fill this gap by hypothesizing facilitatory effects ofdynamic music on attention allocation in the matching of expected and incoming expressive characteristics of concurrent stimuli. Moreover, personality constructs are investigated in mediating the decoding and sensing of experiences linked to immersion, presence, and emotion. The experiment explored experiential states of immersion, emotional valence/arousal as well as trait music empathizing and emotional involvement in the context of dynamic and non-dynamic music. 60subjects answered self-report questionnaires each time after playing a 3rd-person action-adventure in one of three conditions accounting for (1) dynamic music, (2) non-dynamic music/low arousal potential and (3) non-dynamic music/high arousal potential, in this way aiming to manipulate structural-temporal alignment, emotional arousal and resulting congruency of nondiegetic music. Shedding light on the implications of music dramaturgy within a semantic ecology, different layers of mind sets between the player, avatar, and game environment are assumed to moderate a continuous regulatory modulation ofemotional response achieved by context effects of dynamic music