Game or Watch: The Effect of Interactivity on Arousal and Engagement in Video Game Media

Juvrud, Joshua; Ansgariusson, Gabriel; Selleby, Patrik; Johansson, Magnus

doi:10.1109/tg.2021.3073084

Cited by 6 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 48 publications

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“…So, although interactivity has a demonstrable link to presence within virtual environments (Cummings & Bailenson, 2016;Welch et al, 1996), these data suggest that a virtual world can nevertheless be emotionally evocative in its absence. Indeed, these data are in line with games research comparing players and spectators (Juvrud et al, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

The underwood project: A virtual environment for eliciting ambiguous threat

et al. 2022

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Threatening environments can be unpredictable in many different ways. The nature of threats, their timing, and their locations in a scene can all be uncertain, even when one is acutely aware of being at risk. Prior research demonstrates that both temporal unpredictability and spatial uncertainty of threats elicit a distinctly anxious psychological response. In the paradigm presented here, we further explore other facets of ambiguous threat via an environment in which there are no concrete threats, predictable or otherwise, but which nevertheless elicits a building sense of danger. By incorporating both psychological research and principles of emotional game design, we constructed this world and then tested its effects in three studies. In line with our goals, participants experienced the environment as creepy and unpredictable. Their subjective and physiological response to the world rose and fell in line with the presentation of ambiguously threatening ambient cues. Exploratory analyses further suggest that this ambiguously threatening experience influenced memory for the virtual world and its underlying narrative. Together the data demonstrate that naturalistic virtual worlds can effectively elicit a multifaceted experience of ambiguous threat with subjective and cognitive consequences.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

The underwood project: A virtual environment for eliciting ambiguous threat

et al. 2022

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“…Additionally, this requirement of gaze behaviour and the interactivity that comes with video games, compared to the passive consumption of a film, could have distracted the participants, distancing them from immersion. Past research suggests a positive correlation between interactivity and arousal, but not between interactivity and immersion (Juvrud et al, 2022), suggesting that if participants in the present study felt pressured to skilfully complete the demo, then they could have experienced weakened immersion, possibly leading to a more impactful predictor than history with gaming and horror.…”

Section: Fear Questionnaire Scoresmentioning

confidence: 54%

To See and Fear: A Pilot Study on Gaze Behaviour in Horror Gaming

Griffith

2024

Preprint

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Objective: Inspired by the growing popularity of the horror genre, its intense psychological resonance, frequent use of visual horror stimuli, and the dearth of research in the area, this pilot study aimed to explore differences in fixation percentage regarding horror stimuli and fixation number across individuals split between three groups (horror/ gamer; horror/ non-gamer; non-horror/ gamer). Method: 12 participants were recruited and asked a series of questions to determine group, followed by questions from the Fear Questionnaire. Succeeding this, they were equipped with Tobii Pro Eye-Tracking Glasses and allowed to begin a short video game demo, being Resident Evil 7 Teaser: Beginning Hour, chosen due to its firstperson perspective, lack of combat, and shadowed environments. Results: Independent T-Tests revealed no significant differences in fixation number or Fear Questionnaire scores, with one of two demo scenarios extracted for analysis showing significant differences across groups. Conclusion: It is possible that game design or resilience/ desensitisation can explain a lack of consistently significant results, as can a lack of sample power. The demo was deemed appropriate for the study design and the easily replicable procedure lends itself to suggestions for future studies to continue research in this area.

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“…Most studies regarding psychosensory pupil responses are carefully designed to control the luminance of the stimuli in order to isolate the psychological effects of stimuli. It is common for studies to focus on the mean difference of the pupil size between a stimulus and a baseline with identical or similar luminance (Juvrud et al, 2021;Mitre-Hernandez et al, 2021). To achieve this, the pupil size during a time window containing the stimulus is averaged and compared to a similarly averaged pupil size during a baseline.…”

Section: Plr Mitigationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Eye-tracking has been used in games as an input method (ex. to navigate menus) (Smith and Graham, 2006), to optimize the game rendering by prioritizing the regions where the player is looking at (Matthews et al, 2020), as well as to study emotional responses (Juvrud et al, 2021;Mitre-Hernandez et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attenuation of the dynamic pupil light response during screen viewing for arousal assessment

Fanourakis

Chanel

2022

Front. Virtual Real.

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Studies on the psychosensory pupil response often carefully control the lighting conditions in the experiment or require a calibration procedure for each subject under different light conditions for a baseline which is later used to attenuate the pupil light response (PLR) effects from the pupil using steady state models, disregarding the dynamic nature of the pupil. Such approaches are not feasible “in the wild” since they require carefully controlled experimental conditions. We address these shortcomings in the context of screen viewing in a dataset containing 140 subjects playing a first person shooter video game and use an existing dynamic PLR model to attenuate the effects of luminance. We compute the perceived luminance using the pixel values of the screen and show that using the dynamic PLR model is more effective in attenuating the effects of luminance compared to steady state models. Subsequently, we show that attenuating the PLR from the pupil size data improves the performance of machine learning models trained to predict arousing game events compared to using the pupil size without attenuating the PLR. The implications are that our approach for estimating the perceived luminance and attenuating its effects from the pupil data can be applied to screen viewing (including VR) to unobtrusively and continuously monitor users’ emotional arousal via the pupil size.

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Game or Watch: The Effect of Interactivity on Arousal and Engagement in Video Game Media

Cited by 6 publications

References 48 publications

The underwood project: A virtual environment for eliciting ambiguous threat

The underwood project: A virtual environment for eliciting ambiguous threat

To See and Fear: A Pilot Study on Gaze Behaviour in Horror Gaming

Attenuation of the dynamic pupil light response during screen viewing for arousal assessment

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