Figure 1: Our approach seamlessly embeds wheelchair challenges into immersive VR horror game elements to raise accessibility awareness in a playful, non-didactic manner.The left image showcases the virtual wheelchair and its per-wheel physics simulations, including phenomena such as wheel slips on wet surfaces.The other screenshots depict our testbed game that incorporates seven basic wheelchair challenges and is set in a hotel building infiltrated by a monster.

The high degree of sensory immersion is a distinctive feature of head-mounted virtual reality (VR) systems. While the visual detachment from the real world enables unique immersive experiences, users risk collisions due to their inability to perceive physical obstacles in their environment. Even the mere anticipation of a collision can adversely affect the overall experience and erode user confidence in the VR system. However, there are currently no valid tools for assessing collision anxiety. We present the iterative development and validation of the Collision Anxiety Questionnaire (CAQ), involving an exploratory and a confirmatory factor analysis with a total of 159 participants. The results provide evidence for both discriminant and convergent validity and a good model fit for the final CAQ with three subscales: general collision anxiety, orientation, and interpersonal collision anxiety. By utilizing the CAQ, researchers can examine potential confounding effects of collision anxiety and evaluate methods for its mitigation.

The presence of virtual characters in digital games influences players’ experiences; however, the specific impact of various emotional states exhibited by these characters remains unclear. Theories like Emotional Contagion and Emotional Similarity seek to elucidate how the emotions of others affect our own: We might let the emotional state of others infect us, or our emotions may be intensified when others exhibit similar feelings. In the gaming context, we pondered: What impact does playing a horror game alongside a confident virtual character, compared to an anxious one, have on players’ emotional states and experiences? We conducted a lab study with 69 participants and compared a VR horror game played with either a confident or anxious virtual character or alone. Horror games were chosen for their ability to evoke intense emotions, like fear. Our results show that participants could accurately recognize the emotional states portrayed by the virtual character. The horror game significantly increased fear and positive affect, according to the nature of this genre. Not in line with expectations, there was no significant difference between groups regarding player experience and emotional state. We discuss these findings and explore implications for emotional virtual characters within and beyond gaming contexts.

Digital games allow us to adopt the avatar's perspective and experience the (virtual) world from another point of view. The positive effects of such role swaps are well-documented in contexts such as combating racial or ethnic biases. Our work expands this research direction by considering animal avatars: We hypothesize that playing as an animal can improve our attitude towards wildlife and nature. In particular, this manuscript contributes a first systematic study on the effects of animal avatars on players' implicit attitudes towards animals. Our study (N = 78) employs two commercial games featuring different animal avatars, Endling - Extinction is Forever and Bee Simulator, and compares the results of implicit association tests administered before and after gameplay. Our findings confirm significant positive effects of the games on players' implicit associations with foxes and bees. Together with several interesting insights regarding player-avatar relationships and avatar identification, our work paves the groundwork for games contributing positively to societal change.

Consumer social virtual reality (VR) applications have recently started to enable social interactions at a distance. Yet it is still relatively unknown if and to what extent such applications provide meaningful social experiences in cases where in-person leisure activities are not feasible. To explore this, we developed a custom social VR application and conducted an exploratory lab study with 25 dyads in which we compared an in-person and a virtual version of a co-located multiplayer scenario. Our mixed-methods analysis revealed that both scenarios created a socially rich atmosphere and strengthened the social closeness between players. However, the lack of facial animations, limited body language, and a low field of view led to VR’s main social experiential limitations: a reduced mutual awareness and emotional understanding compared to the in-person scenario. We derive implications for social VR design and research as well as game user research.

We frequently utilize face emojis to express emotions in digital communication. But how wholly and precisely do such pictographs sample the emotional spectrum, and are there gaps to be closed? Our research establishes emoji intensity scales for seven basic emotions: happiness, anger, disgust, sadness, shock, annoyance, and love. In our survey (N = 1195), participants worldwide assigned emotions and intensities to 68 face emojis. According to our results, certain feelings, such as happiness or shock, are visualized by manifold emojis covering a broad spectrum of intensities. Other feelings, such as anger, have limited and only very intense representative visualizations. We further emphasize that the cultural background influences emojis’ perception: for instance, linear-active cultures (e.g., UK, Germany) rate the intensity of such visualizations higher than multi-active (e.g., Brazil, Russia) or reactive cultures (e.g., Indonesia, Singapore). To summarize, our manuscript promotes future research on more expressive, culture-aware emoji design.

The spectatorship experience for virtual reality (VR) games differs strongly from its non-VR precursor. When watching non-VR games on platforms such as Twitch, spectators just see what the player sees, as the physical interaction is mostly unimportant for the overall impression. In VR, the immersive full-body interaction is a crucial part of the player experience. Hence, content creators, such as streamers, often rely on green screens or similar solutions to offer a mixed-reality third-person view to disclose their full-body actions. Our work compares the most popular realizations of the first-person and the third-person perspective in an online survey (N = 217) with three different VR games. Contrary to the current trend to stream in third-person, our key result is that most viewers prefer the first-person version, which they attribute mostly to the better focus on in-game actions and higher involvement. Based on the study insights, we provide design recommendations for both perspectives.

Escape rooms exist in various forms, including real-life facilities, board games, and digital implementations. The underlying idea is always the same: players have to solve many diverse puzzles to (virtually) escape from a locked room. Within the last decade, we witnessed a rapidly increasing popularity of such games, which also amplified the amount of related research. However, the respective academic landscape is mostly fragmented in its current state, lacking a common model and vocabulary that would withstand these games' variety. This manuscript aims to establish such a foundation for the analysis and construction of escape rooms. In a first step, we derive a high-level design framework from prior literature. Then, as our main contribution, we establish an atomic puzzle taxonomy that closes the gap between the analog and digital domains. The taxonomy is developed in multiple steps: we compose a basic structure based on previous literature and systematically refine it by analyzing 39 analog and digital escape room games, including recent virtual reality representatives. The final taxonomy consists of mental, physical, and emotional challenges, thereby providing a robust and approachable basis for future works across all application domains that deal with escape rooms or puzzles in general.

The presence of observers and virtual characters can significantly shape our gaming experience. Researchers suppose that most of the basic socio-psychological phenomena are also applicable for digital games. However, the social processes in gaming setups can differ from our experience in other social situations. Our work emphasizes that awareness. Insights are needed for the purposeful design of a game's social setting, specifically in applied contexts of learning and training. Here, we focus on the social facilitation effect, which describes an unconscious change in performance due to the presence of others, by investigating the impact of real observers and virtual agents on player experience and performance in four different games. The results of our four studies show that, in contrast to previous assumptions, in-game success was not significantly influenced by the presence of any social entity, indicating that social facilitation does not generally apply to the context of playing digital games.

Presenting content to an audience is important in several fields, including education, marketing, and entertainment. Therefore, the main goal of the presenter is to transport messages to the audience.

Virtual reality games have repeatedly been criticized as being isolating or "anti-social" due to the necessity of covering the player's perception and cognition from the real world in order to allow diving into the game world. Therefore, we investigate approaches to enhance the sociability of VR games by integrating social entities. In a comprehensive study with 75 participants using a testbed game, we compared the impact of a co-player and a virtual agent on virtual reality player experience in terms of enjoyment, perceived loneliness, social presence, and immersion. Results indicate that social entities decrease the perception of loneliness in VR and that their influence on player experience is moderated by their degree of agency and interactivity. Moreover, we found that social entities do not necessarily enhance enjoyment in VR games compared to a single player mode, but can instead also interfere with positive experiences. We conclude that adding a social component to a VR game can enhance player experience by reducing loneliness but requires close consideration to the design and implementation of both social interaction mechanics and the social entity itself.

This paper explores the potential and applicability of gameplay metrics to assess social behavior and interactions of players. As digital games are often played in social contexts, social phenomena and processes are an important part of game user research and supposed to have significant impact on the overall player experience. Gameplay metrics have been used as one method to measure player behavior, but have not been applied to detect social aspects of play yet. We present the conceptualization, application, and evaluation of three social gameplay metrics that aim at measuring social presence, cooperation, and leadership, respectively. A comparison of the metrics' data with scores of self-report measures addressing the same concepts shows high positive correlations, thus indicating reliability of the metrics.

New technologies have made the mobile phone to a multifunctional ally who accompanies many people in their everyday life. Smartphones and tablet PCs have also established new game settings. In this paper, we investigate a new trend utilizing smart devices as second screens that are added to gaming situations. We give a definition of Second Screen Gaming, and illuminate a special subcategory we call Smart Gaming. Further, we argue that there is a need for comprehensive design guidelines to integrate the second screen as a core part of the game design. Additionally, we have identified several challenges while designing such games and point out the opportunities for game designers in following this new trend. At the end of this work, three game prototypes are introduced as case studies, which demonstrate different aspects of Second Screen Gaming and thereby illustrate how innovative, engaging and highly social games can be created.