Environmental Affordances as a Way to Help in the Design of Videogame Worlds

Abstract

Videogame worlds can be read like built environments, so the approaches used to plan real environments may help the design of virtual worlds. In this way, this paper presents a pilot study that the main objective is to investigate affordances of the environment that can influence people's path selection, namely the corridor width. The main hypothesis is that the corridor width will influence people's preference regarding the path they choose in order to escape from a building (in an emergency situation). Stereoscopic images projected in a screen were presented using a constant stimulus method combined with a two-forced choice method to collect user's responses. Findings suggests that there is a tendency to bear right when users are in an "T" intersection where the right and left corridors are equal, and they tend to turn to the larger corridor regardless its direction.

Materiality and Space

“…Mcgrenere, 2000) or as ways of characterizing technological environments and their effects on what people do with them (e.g. Vilar et al, 2011). However, this chapter makes one of the first attempts to develop a sociomaterial framework, which assumes configurations of affordances as the primary unit of analysis in settings consisting of multiple technologies.…”