Högskolan i Skövde

This study explored how an avatar’s movement behaviors in the first-person perspective can affect the player’s immersion experience, performance, and character identification through two distinct characters’ animation behaviors, the realistic and cartoonish animation. Animation frameworks regarding humanoid movement personalities were applied to create an artifact, namely the principle of Laban Movement Analysis (Newlove & Dalby, 2004) and Disney’s twelve principles of animation (Thomas & Johnston,1981), and Gallaher’s (1992) dimension of style. Sixteen participants played the artifact and answered a questionnaire. Then the data were analyzed through the triangulation method, where multiple data were collected and analyzed, namely quantitative and qualitative data. The result has found that the participant’s performance significantly impacts their immersion and character identification. The result also indicated that participants were more immersive, making it easier to identify with the character through the realistic animation. They completed the course faster, had higher accuracy, and scored better on the realistic animation variant. However, the result may not be generalizable to the general audience of game players since all participants were experienced in FPS games and were male. Future studies may require other target audiences, such as genders and inexperienced-experienced players.