How visual background motion and task difficulty modulate players’ performance in a shooting task

Abstract

International audienceIn many virtual environments, such as those of video games, the scene background moves to give the illusion of movement. In the present study, two experiments were designed to investigate the combined impact of lateral background motion and task difficulty on players’ performance in a target-shooting task. Participants had to perform the task on either the moving or the stationary version of a patterned background that was either green (Experiment 1) or black-and-white (Experiment 2). The difficulty of the task was manipulated by varying the number of visual features shared between the target and distractor items. In accordance with the literature, the participants’ performance was worse, and the number and duration of participants’ fixations increased when the task was difficult. Background motion had an additive, negative impact on performance. When the background was black-and-white, background motion had an impact only when the task was easy but not when it was difficult. Design recommendations based on manipulations of the background characteristics are proposed to establish the level of difficulty in simple video games that use lateral background motion

Influence of head-up displays’ characteristics on user experience in video games

“…The influence of specific elements of the video game visual interfaces, such as point of view or background characteristics, on player performance or experience has been investigated in several studies (e.g., Bae et al, 2012;Browne and Anand, 2012;Caroux et al, 2015bCaroux et al, , 2013Caroux et al, , 2011Dyson, 2010;Hou et al, 2012;Jie and Clark, 2008;Knez and Niedenthal, 2008;Sabri et al, 2007;Takatalo et al, 2011;Wolfson and Case, 2000;Yannakakis et al, 2010). However, only a few of them investigated the influence of HUDs on player behavior, and more specifically on player experience.…”

Influence of visual background complexity and task difficulty on action video game players’ performance

“…The task used in this experiment was presented to the participants as a game where they had to locate and hit targets as quickly as possible with a viewfinder. This task is based on the one used by Caroux et al [9]. Each participant had to perform 256 trials, divided into 4 blocks of 64 trials.…”

“…For example, game designers can vary the number of enemies displayed in the environment, the speed of their movements or their level of artificial intelligence [7,8]. The use of visual features of game interfaces to modulate the difficulty of the game has only been evaluated by a few studies [9,10].…”