Lost in Open Worlds: Design Patterns for Player Navigation in Virtual Reality Games

The outstanding characteristic of virtual reality (VR) games is the ability to immerse the player into the game world and to support a natural experience. Reality offers a high degree of freedom in moving around, which is accordingly expected by players in the virtual environment. This freedom of player navigation challenges designers of open VR worlds. Players might get lost, get bored, or unintendedly reach the world's limits, which all can break immersion and result in negative player experiences. We identify typical navigational problems in first person VR games and present design patterns to guide players without restricting freedom and immersion. As an initial step towards empirically validated design recommendations, we conducted a study with 88 participants to evaluate the most common design patterns by analyzing player behavior in experimental settings. Our results confirm both the validity of our approach and methodology, and the practical implication of the presented patterns.