World of Warships

Immersion Level and Bot Player Identification in a Multiplayer Online Game: The World of Warships Case Study

This study investigates whether a player's level of immersion in a multiplayer online game affects their ability to distinguish human opponents from bots, using World of Warships as the setting.

• The central hypothesis was not supported: higher immersion did not reduce players' accuracy at identifying bot opponents in World of Warships, with no significant group difference in identification accuracy (p = 0.534).
• Immersion scores were high overall (mean 96.87, SD = 15.61) and showed no significant difference between experienced (M = 95.53) and casual players (M = 98.20; Mann-Whitney U = 89.5, p = 0.34).
• Descriptively, experienced players identified human versus bot opponents correctly more often than novices (73.33% versus 53.33%), a trend in the predicted direction that was not statistically reliable.