Digital Games as Social Presence Technology: Development of the Social Presence in Gaming Questionnaire (SPGQ)

Digital gaming presents an engaging, widely varied, and increasingly popular pastime. Yet in recent theorising about digital game experience, the social richness of playing is often marginalised or neglected all together. We argue that, although not previously recognized or defined as such, digital gaming technology can usefully be regarded as social presence technology, as it provides a setting for interacting with others at a distance and augments communication in colocated settings. In the service of future investigations of game experience, and gaming as a social experience in particular, we developed a self-report measure, the Social Presence in Gaming Questionnaire (SPGQ), based on focus group interviews with both casual and avid gamers and a social presence scale developed for other social presence devices – the Networked Minds Measure of Social Presence [40]. This paper describes the factor structure of this new measure and explores basic sensitivity and validity.