Research / Measuring player experience

Short paper · 2014

Too Many Questionnaires: Measuring Player Experience Whilst Playing Digital Games

Nordin, A. I., Denisova, A., & Cairns, P.

ConferenceThe 7th York Doctoral Symposium on Computer Science and Electronics, 2014

Teaser figure: seven questionnaires used to measure engagement in games (IEQ, GEQ, PENS, SPGQ, GameFlow, Flow, Presence), the problems this causes, and a proposed study comparing the IEQ and GEQ.
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In short

Questionnaires are a direct way to measure players' experiences, but so many are available that it is hard, especially for new researchers, to know which aspect of experience each one measures. This position paper lists the questionnaires currently used to measure engagement in digital games and argues for positioning them against each other.

Key findings

  • Questionnaires in use include the IEQ, GEQ, PENS, SPGQ, GameFlow and flow and presence questionnaires, with overlapping constructs and uneven validation.
  • Without knowing how they relate, researchers tend to pick whichever is most accessible, and results are hard to compare.
  • We proposed comparing the IEQ and GEQ directly, a study later carried out in The Convergence of Player Experience Questionnaires (CHI PLAY 2016).

Read and cite

PDF (accepted version)

APA citation

Nordin, A. I., Denisova, A., & Cairns, P. (2014). Too Many Questionnaires: Measuring Player Experience Whilst Playing Digital Games. In The 7th York Doctoral Symposium on Computer Science and Electronics (pp. 69-74).

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