Measuring: Perceived Uncertainty

Authors: Christopher Power, Paul Cairns, Alena Denisova, Themis Papaioannou, and Ruth Gultrom
Published: 2019
Number of questions: 24
Likert scale: 7-point for more precision or 5-point for a shorter survey [ranging from (1) Strongly Disagree to (7) Strongly Agree]

Subscales: Five sub-scales measuring different types of perceived uncertainty in digital games: (1) Uncertainty of Decision Making (UDM); (2) Exploration (EXP); (3) Uncertainty of Taking Action (UTA); (4) Uncertainty of Problem Solving (UPS) and (5) External Uncertainty (EXU).

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Questionnaire items

• Decision Making:

  This factor has a variety of statements related to the player evaluating their actions against potential outcomes of the game. Weighing options in relation to the outcomes, deciding their relative importance, comparing to heuristics, and the notion of weighting outcome being relatively better than another all relate to Uncertainty in Decision Making (UDM).

• My actions were not influencing the outcome of the game.
• I could not choose which actions were better.
• I could not say if the game had more than one outcome.
• I did not know how my performance influenced the outcome.
• I did not know how the outcome(s) were connected to what I did.

• Exploration:

  This factor relates to players undertaking Exploration (EXP) of the game to discover new things to inform their decisions.

• I needed to discover things to make progress.
• I needed to explore in order to know what to do next.

• Taking Action:

  These statements are related to the player Uncertainty in TakingAction (UTA) in the game. Some are related to how action is taken within the game, whereas others are related to the players' ability to perform the actions.

• I felt I was stuck during the game.
• I found it difficult to keep track of all elements in the game.
• The game mechanics were overwhelming.
• I think what I was doing in the game was not right.
• I was not confident that I could perform some actions in the game.
• The actions I had to perform were too demanding for my skills.
• I struggled to do the right actions.

• Problem Solving:

  The statements in this factor largely revolve around the player trying to understand the goals of the game and trying to decompose the different possible options available to them within the game. These statements appear to closely relate to the Uncertainty in Problem Solving (UPS) processes.

• I knew how each goal could be achieved. (-)
• I understood the game mechanics. (-)
• I knew how to play the game when I started. (-)
• I often felt lost.
• I could find the solutions required for achieving the goals of the game. (-)

• External:

  These statements relate to the notion of whether External Uncertainty (EXU) is impacting the performance of the player. There are notions of the player perceiving the system as behaving unpredictably, discovering things through serendipity, or the situation simply being unfair.

• The game was unfair.
• Unpredictable random elements were influencing my performance.
• I was relying on chance in the game.
• Random elements in the game were preventing me from achieving my goal.
• The outcome of my actions was mainly influenced by chance.

Three of these factors (UDM, UTA and UPS) are strongly related to each other as the feeling of uncertainty in actually playing the game but with emphasis on different aspects of decision making, taking actions or problem solving. These three factors seem to capture important aspects of the internal uncertainty that players might experience. The other two factors are essentially distinct from these three and each other. The Exploration (EXP) factor concerns gathering information about the game to alleviate uncertainty. The External Uncertainty (EXU) factor concerns the feeling of unpredictability, that is, aligned with uncertainty that is aleatoric and external rather than epistemic.

Using the questionnaire

The questionnaire be used as a whole (all 24 items) to measure overall perceived uncertainty when playing digital games. To evaluate a separate types of perceived uncertainty (e.g. decision making), you can use individual sub-scales.

When to use? The questionnaire is meant to be administered immediately after the game session has finished.

Ideally, items should be presented to participants in random order and without naming the five uncertainty types.

Scoring: To score each uncertainty type, take the sum (no missing values) or the average (if you have missing values) of the Likert scale responses from the items belonging to each challenge type.

The (-) next to an item means that the item should be scored in reverse, e.g. a 1 out of 7 should become 7 out of 7 or 3 should become 5 in the final analysis. A score of 4 does not need to be reversed. If using Excel, you can use the following formula to do this: =8-[cellwithvalue] for 7-point Likert answers and =6-[cellwithvalue] for 5-point Likert answers.

Reliability and Validity

Validation: The questionnaire is a systematic, extensive, reliable, and valid tool to measure perceived challenge in video games, having been initially validated with 708 players and across different genres.

Availability: You can find a detailed description of the validation of this questionnaire in the original article:
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