Invisible Dynamic Mechanic Adjustment in Virtual Reality Games

Justus Robertson, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera, R. Michael Young

Abstract: A key part of managing a player's virtual reality experience is ensuring that the environment behaves consistently to the player's interaction. In some instances, however, it is important to change how the world behaves-i.e. the world's simulation rules or mechanics-because doing so preserves the virtual environment's intended quality. Mechanics changes must be done carefully; if too overt, they may be perceivable and potentially thwart a player's sense of presence or agency.This paper reports the result of a study, which demonstrates the widely-held but heretofore-untested belief that changing an environment's mechanics without considering what the player knows is visible to the player. The study's findings motivate the paper's second contribution: an automated method to perform invisible dynamic mechanics adjustment, which affords shifting a game's previously-established mechanics in a manner that is not perceivably inconsistent to players. This method depends on a knowledge-tracking strategy and two such strategies are presented: (1) a conservative one, relevant to a wide variety of virtual environments, and (2) a more nuanced one, relevant to environments that will be experienced via head-mounted virtual reality displays. The paper concludes with a variety of design-centered considerations for the use of this artificial intelligence system within virtual reality.