A Palette of Deepened Emotions: Exploring Emotional Challenge in Virtual Reality Games

TY - GEN

T1 - A Palette of Deepened Emotions

T2 - 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2020

AU - Peng, Xiaolan

AU - Huang, Jin

AU - Denisova, Alena

AU - Chen, Hui

AU - Tian, Feng

AU - Wang, Hongan

N1 - Funding Information: This work was funded by National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFB1001201), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61661146002, 61802379) and partially supported by Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS. Publisher Copyright: © 2020 ACM.

PY - 2020/4/23

Y1 - 2020/4/23

N2 - Recent work introduced the notion of 'emotional challenge' promising for understanding more unique and diverse player experiences (PX). Although emotional challenge has immediately attracted HCI researchers' attention, the concept has not been experimentally explored, especially in virtual reality (VR), one of the latest gaming environments. We conducted two experiments to investigate how emotional challenge affects PX when separately from or jointly with conventional challenge in VR and PC conditions. We found that relatively exclusive emotional challenge induced a wider range of different emotions in both conditions, while the adding of emotional challenge broadened emotional responses only in VR. In both experiments, VR significantly enhanced the measured PX of emotional responses, appreciation, immersion and presence. Our findings indicate that VR may be an ideal medium to present emotional challenge and also extend the understanding of emotional (and conventional) challenge in video games.

AB - Recent work introduced the notion of 'emotional challenge' promising for understanding more unique and diverse player experiences (PX). Although emotional challenge has immediately attracted HCI researchers' attention, the concept has not been experimentally explored, especially in virtual reality (VR), one of the latest gaming environments. We conducted two experiments to investigate how emotional challenge affects PX when separately from or jointly with conventional challenge in VR and PC conditions. We found that relatively exclusive emotional challenge induced a wider range of different emotions in both conditions, while the adding of emotional challenge broadened emotional responses only in VR. In both experiments, VR significantly enhanced the measured PX of emotional responses, appreciation, immersion and presence. Our findings indicate that VR may be an ideal medium to present emotional challenge and also extend the understanding of emotional (and conventional) challenge in video games.

KW - emotion

KW - emotional challenge

KW - games

KW - player experience

KW - virtual reality

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85091288912&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3313831.3376221

DO - 10.1145/3313831.3376221

M3 - Conference contribution

AN - SCOPUS:85091288912

T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

BT - CHI 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

PB - ACM

Y2 - 25 April 2020 through 30 April 2020

ER -