Helsinki School of Economics

Presence Experience in Mobile Gaming

A controlled experiment compared presence experienced while playing a rally game on a large PC screen versus a small PDA screen, asking whether mobile gaming is as immersive as PC gaming.

• Players experienced significantly higher presence on a large PC screen than on a small PDA screen, with spatial situation model scores of 3.31 versus 2.73 and self-location scores of 3.40 versus 2.10.
• Attentional engagement did not differ by device (4.23 on the PDA versus 4.20 on the PC), indicating that attention is necessary but not sufficient for presence: small-screen players can be highly engaged without feeling spatially immersed.
• Suspension of disbelief showed no significant device effect, and involvement approached but did not reach significance.