Looking Confused? – Introducing a VR Game Design for Arousing Confusion Among Players

This paper describes a virtual reality prototype’s game and level design that should serve as stimulus material to arouse confusion among players. In doing so, we will use the stimulus to create a system that analyzes the players’ gaze behavior and determine whether and when the player is confused or already frustrated. Consequently, this information can then be used by game and level designers to give the player appropriate assistance and guidance during gameplay. To reach our goal of creating a design that arouses confusion, we used guidelines for high-quality level design and did the exact opposite. We see the PLEY Workshop as a forum to identify and discuss the potentials and risks of the stimulus’ design and level structure. In general, the paper should provide insights into our design decisions for researchers interested in investigating gaze behavior in games.