Title
Exploring Design Features for Enhancing Players' Challenge in Strategy Games.
Abstract
This paper examines how to make a player feel more challenged in a strategic computer game. It is hypothesized that information availability and resource advantage affect play difficulty, which in turn affects the challenge experienced. The difficulty of play can be defined in terms of the mental workload that players experience and the physical effort that players exert. Forty-five male college and graduate students participated in a 3 x 3 ( information availability x resource advantage) between-subjects factorial design experiment. This experiment measured player mental workload, physical effort, and challenge. The results indicate that information availability affects player mental workload, and resource advantage affects levels of player physical effort, respectively. Moreover, the relationship between mental workload and challenge was found to be an inverted U-shaped curve; in other words, too much or too little mental workload may decrease player challenge. The relationship between physical effort and challenge exhibited similar characteristics.
Year
DOI
Venue
2007
10.1089/cpb.2006.9940
CYBERPSYCHOLOGY & BEHAVIOR
Field
DocType
Volume
Social psychology,Information availability,Workload,Psychology,Multimedia
Journal
10
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
1094-9313
7
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.64
7
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shang Hwa Hsu11218.38
Ming-Hui Wen227316.65
Muh-Cherng Wu322716.58