Perceived realism in shooting games: Towards scale validation

Perceived realism is a key concept in explaining the mental processing of media messages and the societal impact of media. Despite its importance, few studies have examined its conceptualization and dimensional structure from an empirical point of view, especially with regard to digital games. In this paper we present three studies aimed at 1) validating a dimensional structure of realism judgements on shooting games and 2) creating a valid measurement instrument. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses support five dimensions of perceived game realism that are commonly presented in previous studies. An investigation of the internal reliability and psychometric properties of the constructs reveals that the measurement instrument conforms to a large extent to the requirements of scale validation.