Measuring social presence in team-based digital games

Abstract

Increasingly, digital games offer sophisticated multiplayer experiences with teams of players able to play against "the computer" in raids or against each other in a variety of team matches. Social presence is therefore an important part of the gaming experience. However, existing measures of social presence in games lack the sophistication to deal with these more diverse gaming situations. This paper describes the development of a new questionnaire to measure the complex nature of social presence in digital games. The resulting questionnaire consists of 39 items with two main modules addressing competitive and collaborative components of social play.