Operationalizing Engagement with Multimedia as User Coherence with Context

Traditional approaches for assessing user engagement within multimedia environments rely on methods that are removed from the human computer interaction itself, such as surveys, interviews and baselined physiology. We propose a context coherence approach that operationalizes engagement as the amount of independent user variation that covaries in time with multimedia contextual events during unscripted interactions. This can address questions about the features of multimedia users are most engaged and how engaged users are without the need for prescribed interactions or baselining. We assessed the validity of this approach in a psychophysiological study. Forty participants played interactive video games. Intake and post-stimulus questionnaires collected subjective engagement reports that provided convergent and divergent validity criteria to evaluate our approach. Estimates of coherence between physiological variation and in-game contextual events predicted subjective engagement and added information beyond physiological metrics computed from baselines taken outside of the multimedia context. Our coherence metric accounted for task-dependent engagement, independent of predispositions; this was not true of a baselined physiological approach that was used for comparison. Our findings show compelling evidence that a context-sensitive approach to measuring engagement overcomes shortcomings of traditional methods by making best use of contextual information sampled from multimedia in time-series analyses.