Exploring the Effect of Display Type on Co-Located Multiple Player Gameplay Performance, Immersion, Social Presence, and Behavior Patterns

With advances in virtual reality (VR) technology, immersive head-mounted displays (HMDs) have become widely accessible. These devices have made social games and platforms like VRChat popular. Although the literature points to several factors that affect immersion and social presence, there has been no study that has explored the effect of social display setup on immersion and gameplay in multi-player social games. This work aims to shed light on this issue and investigates the effect of social display setup on gameplay performance and experience (i.e., immersion and social presence) in a multi-player competitive social game (i.e., Jenga). We conducted a one-way between-subjects experiment with 24 participants equally distributed in three groups (4 pairs of 2 participants in each group, who were all strangers to each other) according to three social display setups (2 small-screen tablets, 1 shared 40-inch large TV, and 2 VR HMDs). Our results indicate that (1) players gave a lower rating to challenge in the VR-based social setting than in the small-screen tablet display setting, and (2) gameplay behavior patterns are different among these social display setups.