1. Final Project – Introduction

Welcome to my blog. My name is Dragos Liche and I’m a Computer Games Design Student at the University of Suffolk, Ipswich. I have started this blog to document my journey into the 3rd Year module – Final Project – in which I will explore 3D Game Environments and how they affect users. To be specific, I want to be able to elicit the emotion of Awe in a player through an interactive experience that involves traversal of a 3D environment.

My initial proposal was to create a gameplay experience in which a player would go through a series of challenges under stress, increasing tension over time, at the release of which the player would feel awe. The initial proposed milestones can be seen in Fig.1, and have suffered changes which will be explained below. After analyzing the amount of work needed for this project with my tutor, we came to the conclusion that the project was too large in scope, and that it would be hard to create a desired experience that includes all of the aforementioned components in the time frame that I have available.

Thus, I decided to instead reduce the scope of the project to a short VR Experience in which the player’s only interaction with the environment would be movement. Introducing Virtual Reality would solve one of the problems that I had, which initially led me to wanting to create a gameplay loop: immersion.

Since the beginning of the project, there was an underlying worry that creating an awe-inducing environment which contained all of the needed components would still not be enough for a user to feel these emotions, since sitting in front of the screen would not allow them to immediately be immersed.

As taught by Pimm (2017), immersion can be categorised into three different types: cognitive, sensory and narrative.

Cognitive immersion can be described as sustained, focused attention, which can lead to Flow (Csikszentmihalyi,1990), a state where the user does not react to exterior stimuli. This can be achieved by creating a mechanic which requires the player’s sustained mental and/or physical effort. For example, a game like Tetris Effect (Resonair, Monstars, 2018) is a highly demanding game from both a physical and mental standpoint, requiring players to place bricks of different sizes and shapes which are rapidly descending from the top of the screen in order to create multple straight horizontal lines, while simultaneously strategising what to do with the next piece, which is shown on the screen. In the image below, the player can be seen concentrating, looking at the screen without responding to exterior stimuli.

Sensory immersion can be achieved by creating an authentic selection of sensory elements within an environment, which will ensure that the player does not stop to question the cohesiveness and believablity of the environment. This, does not necessarily have to mean that the environment has to be realistic, but rather that it needs to make sense within the world that the creator is depicting. For instance, although the film Avatar (2009) depicts a distant planet called Pandora, which has vegetation (Fig.3) that is almost completely different from that of Earth, the visual quality of the character and the scene makes them believable enough for the viewer to suspend their disbelief. This type of immersion, when eliciting awe and wonder, is often accompanied by “vocal bursts” (Simon-Thomaset al, 2009), such as “wow”.

This type of immersion is crucial to the development of this project, which concerns itself with creating awe and, subsequently, requires constant sensory immersion. Virtual Reality proves to be extremely beneficial to creating sensory immersion, because on top of the previous two senses: sight and hearing, it adds a third sense – proprioception, which can be described as the sensation of inhabiting a body (Tuthill & Azim, 2018). The players will be moving their heads constantly in order to look around the environment and it will create an alignment in equilibrium between the in-game character and the players, which is what will further increase their immersion.

Narrative immersion is associated with the characters in a story, and is triggered by vicarious emotions (Paulus et al, 2013). A good way to tell that narrative immersion is achieved when players start referring to characters as they would when talking about themselves, saying phrases like “I’m low on health” or “I died”. This type of immersion becomes essential when creating a game, but it will be neglected for the purposes of this project due to time and resource constraints.

After a shift in the project’s aim, more time for research was needed as the project had taken an unexpected turn, in order to accommodate for the need to learn how to use Unreal Engine 4’s VR features. Two extra weeks of research were added in order to acquire a better understanding of VR Technology. This will be explored in detail in a blog post regarding my VR Research.

In my next blog post, I will be discussing the Design theory that I will base my project upon.

Bibliography

• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperCollins Publishers
• Paulus FM, Müller-Pinzler L, Westermann S and Krach S (2013) ‘On the distinction of empathic and vicarious emotions’. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 7:196. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00196 (Accessed 22/01/2020)
• Pimm, D. (2017) Immersion. lecture notes, University of Suffolk
• Simon-Thomas, E. R., Keltner, D. J., Sauter, D., Sinicropi-Yao, L., & Abramson, A. (2009) ‘The Voice Conveys Specific Emotions: Evidence From Vocal Burst Displays’. Emotion, 9(6), pp.838–846. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017810 (Accessed 23/01/2020)
• Tuthill, J.C., Azim, E. (2018) ‘Proprioception’ Current Biology Vol. 28, pp. 187-207