There are many virtual environments found in the serious game community that simulate real world scenarios. There is a broad range of fidelity and experimental controls among these serious games. An important component to most evaluations is the extent to which level of fidelity impacts the persons immersed in the serious game. While a great deal of virtual environment and serious game research has assessed the subjective state or feeling of the participant (e.g., the participant’s sense of presence) through the use of questionnaires, the current study examines participant experience by examining psychophysiological responses of participants to their surroundings. The primary goal in this study was evaluative: will a virtual environment with arousing contents result in increased sensory arousal if it is presented in a highly immersive configuration? A secondary goal of this study was to investigate the utility of our environment to offer varying levels of stimulus threat to impact the user’s experience of the virtual environment. Increased simulation fidelity in an arousing environment resulted in faster heart rates and increased startle eyeblink amplitudes, suggesting that higher fidelity scenarios had great efficacy related to sensory arousal. 1. Psychophysiology to Assess Impact of Varying Levels of Simulation Fidelity in a Threat Environment Virtual environments (VEs) and serious games offer the potential to stimulate and measure changes in the users’ emotion, neurocognition, and motivation processes. The value in using simulation technology to produce serious games targeting such processes has been acknowledged by an encouraging body of research. Some of the work in this area has addressed affective processes: anxiety disorders, pain distraction, and posttraumatic stress disorder [1–3]. Other work has assessed neuropsychological processes [4, 5]. Further, psychophysiology is increasingly being incorporated into research using virtual reality environments [6–8]. The use of psychophysiological measures in affective and neurocognitive studies of persons immersed in VE scenarios offers the potential to develop current physiological computing approaches [9] into affective computing [10] scenarios. The incorporation of simulation technology into neuroergonomic and psychophysiological research is advancing at a steady rate [11]. New discoveries and techniques are demanding a more rapid and advanced paradigm. In response to the demands, a wide variety of simulations have been developed. The range and depth of these simulations cover a large domain, from
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