“Mirror Dwellers”: Social VR, Identity and Internet Culture

VRChat is a popular social virtual reality (VR) application with a strong user base and countless virtual worlds to explore and avatars to ”wear”. The breadth and popularity of this social VR game, and the forms of interaction that it allows, makes it a fascinating case study for investigating the effects of VR experiences in the creation and communication of online identities. In this study, we focus on a specific phenomenon that enshrines several nodal points in the evolution of VR experiences: virtual mirrors. Fiery debates between players reveal polarised responses to playful uses of virtual mirrors. We use a body of discussions from the VRChat Reddit community to look into such discourses, practices, and positions. Due to the rhetoric adopted we chose to contextualise our findings within Internet Culture, highlighting how the novelty of the medium explodes some of the contradictions of this media ideology and challenging and reshaping online identity.

First-Person Narratives: Examining Narrative Persuasion in Virtual Reality

Classification of Gameplay Interaction in Digital Cultural Heritage

Digital heritage has matured over the past twenty years and now calls are being made for interactive experiences that augment digital representation with digital performance. The paper considers sources for such a performance: be it documented sources, contemporary cultures, or gameplay from other entertainment game genres. It considers the needs of various stakeholders: the archaeologist, the historian, the game designer and the target audience and suggests thematically consistent multiple gameplay options that serve the different needs while reusing game assets and characters. This aims to contribute to the collaboration with the DiGRA community on serious cultural heritage game development, focusing on the player as performer, rather than just as an observer.

From ‘Silly’ to ‘Scumbag’: Reddit Discussion of a Case of Groping in a Virtual Reality Game

This paper examines key discussion points among VR-interested Reddit users regarding a controversial case of VR groping reported in 2016. Through a mixed-methods approach that includes qualitative thematic analysis and quantitative coding, this paper identifies four key discussion themes: 1) Conceptualization—what is the act of groping? 2) Ethics—what is (un)acceptable about the act? 3) Action—what should be done about it? and 4) Vision— what does this act mean for the future of VR? Within these themes, most comments were dedicated to the questions of whether the act of groping in VR constitutes sexual assault or sexual harassment, whether it is the individual’s responsibility to respond to this act, and whether this act causes harm. These results assist in the formation of a framework for understanding and addressing concerns related to unwanted sexual behaviours in VR and other digital play spaces.

Gaming my way to recovery: Understanding how to integrate serious video games into youth mental health services

Hybrid Board Game Design Guidelines

Hybrid board games combine non-digital and digital elements to introduce a new kind of game experiences. In this study, we present 17 design guidelines for hybrid board games. These guidelines are the result of an iterative process of workshopping with industry experts and academic researchers, supported by developer interviews and player survey. They are presented as starting points for hybrid board game design and aim to help the designers to avoid common pitfalls and evaluate different trade-offs.

Virtual Reality is ‘Finally Here’: A Qualitative Exploration of Formal Determinants of Player Experience in VR

It is already a truism that consumer virtual reality (VR) systems offer sensorially immersive first-person experiences that differ markedly from those begat by traditional screen displays. But what are the implications of this for player experience? It is well-documented that VR can induce illusions of non-mediation; of spatial presence; of embodiment in avatars. This paper asks—and reports on—what common features of digital games are liable to be experienced as stressors (that is, as beyond optimally affective or intense) when the player perceives her avatar–self egocentrically as a ‘life-sized’, spatially present, and potentially vulnerable entity within the gameworld. The present paper describes and discusses findings from a qualitative content analysis of immersive virtual environments (IVEs) experienced via head-mounted display-based VR systems akin to those now commercially available. A purposive sample comprising video, photographic, and written documentation of IVEs (n = 124) from historical clinical VR and telepresence research is interrogated through the lens of cognitive media theory. Effecting a novel approach inspired by systematic review, the present study's observations and inferences regarding players' subjective experience of IVEs are presented alongside relevant findings from the research literature sampled. This produces a preliminary formal framework for discussing VR player experience as significantly structured by patiency (cf. agency), with VR experiences eliciting self-directed affect, and thereby somewhat unintentionally engaging the player's body as a site for feedback.

Little VR Pet Shop: A Reverse Turing Multiplayer Virtual Reality Game

Singularity: Designing a Cooperative Mixed Reality Game for a Co-located Setting

Immersion in Game Atmospheres for the Video Game Heritage Preservation

The video game heritage is being preserved especially on the Web: comments, screenshots, sounds, videos, etc. But one important element is missing: the environment in which we play (game atmosphere) is one of our strongest memories. This article describes an investigation-based method to record game atmospheres, the four atmospheres we are archiving (one bedroom, one living room, and two game room atmospheres), the interactions allowed in these virtual environments, and some technical points about how to access these atmospheres (on the Web or thanks to a virtual reality system).