Invisible Dynamic Mechanic Adjustment in Virtual Reality Games

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.