UC Irvine

From Sword Art Online to Ready Player One, people have never stopped envisioning how virtual reality (VR) can transform digital games and potentially everyday life. As VR continually evolves, understanding its interaction design is crucial. In this dissertation, I establish a framework of simulation and efficiency as two fundamental design values for VR game interactions. I theorize the design of VR game interactions as reconciling value tensions between simulation and efficiency through case studies of the state-of-the-art in the first generation commercial VR games. In game studies, simulation often refers to how well game interactions represent their real-world counterparts, and efficiency is often an aspect of usability, playability, and ludic interaction. I contend that simulation and efficiency can be viewed further as duality rather than mapping them to separate continuums and scales as in existing frameworks. I examine the formal elements of the platform, the interaction, and the game context within the interaction design to see how the value tensions between simulation and efficiency can be amplified or reconciled.

My dataset includes hundreds of gameplay screenshots depicting interaction design examples of over 20 semantic actions organized under four categories: 1) Locomotion Interactions, 2) Object Interactions, 3) FPS Combat Interactions, and 4) RPG Combat Interactions. I use the Oculus Rift S headset and motion controllers as the VR platform for my close reading. I analyze several representative examples in each category and map them onto the two-dimensional simulation and efficiency framework for comparison.

The analysis produces new understandings of simulation and efficiency and extends two existing frameworks – 1) interaction fidelity and 2) narrative and embodied interface. I redefine simulation to emphasize the experiential perspective of achieving realism over its predominant formal perspective of being technically realistic. I provide a new perspective for the controversial uncanny valley model in the interaction fidelity framework to reveal the risk of over-simulating the realistic. For efficiency, I propose a hierarchical model to highlight levels of inefficient interactions and the contextual efficiency of achieving the desired game goal. For practical contributions, I analyze the emerging best practices (high simulation, high efficiency) and representative cases of suboptimal design. Finally, I propose several principles and guidelines for future VR game interaction design based on the new simulation and efficiency framework.