Time perception, immersion and music in videogames

People who play videogames often report the sense of immersion in the game with a particular feature of immersion being a loss of the sense of time passing. In this paper, we investigate if altering the degree of immersion in a videogame really does influence people’s psychological perception of time passing. We use music to make a maze game more immersive and we measure time perception using two paradigms that are well-established in psychology. We find that the addition of music does alter time perception but only in one paradigm. Additionally, music was able to influence immersion by both increasing it or decreasing it depending on the choice of music. The overall picture is therefore complex but suggests that music could be an important factor in the perception of time whilst playing videogames.