Can Diegetic User Interface Improves Immersion in Role-Playing Games?

Video games have developed into a form of entertainment well-known in this modern era. Role-playing games (RPG) are on the rise allowing players to play different roles only available in the virtual world. Immersion is one of the desired aspects of an RPG. One can describe an immersion as an experience when the player believes the game world is real as he/she is being part of the game, ignoring the actual world surrounding him/her. Immersion is crucial for a player to be able to control the character’s actions. One approach to drive the immersion is through the user interface (UI) design, commonly called Heads-up Display (HUD). HUD provides players with information/attributes relevant to the game world. HUD is a non-diegetic user interface, which means that the game information displayed is not actually part of the game world. A diegetic user interface means that game information/attributes are embedded with the game object. Some articles state that immersion can rise by minimizing the non-diegetic elements in the HUD. To prove these statements, quantitative and qualitative analyses were carried out to whether HUD actually impacts player immersion. Based on a survey of ten participants, the resulting 2-sample t-test showed that there was an increase in immersion when playing the games without HUD. Moreover, the 2-way ANOVA showed that the HUD factor has a significant effect on player immersion. Meanwhile, the game factor and the interaction between the game and the HUD do not have a significant effect on immersion. This research shows that playing games with a diegetic user interface could increase player’s immersion, especially in RPG games.