PT VR


 

My Role: Researcher, Production Management & Game Designer

Platform: HTC Vive

Game: Atmospheric Horror

Developed by:

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Adaptation of a Game as Research Tool

 
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PT VR is an independent VR project developed as a short room-scale VR horror experience for the HTC Vive headset. This atmospheric horror experience was developed in collaboration with Mikkel Svendsen as a research tool for my Master’s thesis.

We developed a game explicitly modified to realize the experimental conditions, which allowed us to have full control over every element in the game, minimize the impact of confounding variables, and to log in-game events. Modifying and adapting an existing commercial game made our research tool closer, experience-wise, to real life gaming situations, contributing to higher levels of ecological validity

Our reasoning behind adapting P.T. to VR as the experiment’s stimulus material was that, not only does the virtual space in P.T. features a series of perceptual triggers that effectively activates the human fear module, but also that the title has been recognised by critics and enthusiasts alike as one of the best, and most compelling horror game experiences ever made, reaching the status of a cult classic

 
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The general intuition among game developers is that playing in VR is more impactful and effective at eliciting certain emotions than an experience on a conventional flat screen. Particularly, horror experiences can be a bit too intense when wearing a head mounted display. Taking the headset off and breaking the spell of the virtual space takes much more effort than with traditional gaming experiences; the illusion of being physically in the virtual space makes any fictional threat feel quite real.

VR offers a fascinating format for exploring the horror genre, which is why it is important to understand the medium and its effects. The literature suggests that, as a medium, VR has the potential to elicit strong emotions in players, but there is a lack of comparative studies offering empirical evidence.

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My thesis presents the adapted design and implementation of a horror game as a research tool and the subsequent study where it was used was used to identify and compare player responses. Being aware of the existence and impact of these differences between mediums can provide insight for future empirical studies, as well as be used by VR horror game developers to make informed decisions in the implementation of their ideas.

In game academia there is an interest in using physiological measures to gain unbiased data on emotional experiences. In game development, there is also an interest for this type of studies, which are used to evaluate game design and to influence the gameplay experience. Although opinions are divided on the use of biometrics to measure fear in games, with some researchers suggesting that only jump-scares can be adequately measured, with my study I was able to also capture another kind of fear, ongoing suspense.

 

Walking in endless circles

Besides adjusting the design of P.T. for room-scale VR in terms of level geometry, we also modified the sequence of events and the type of content. In the original version, the game has a total of 14 loops; our version has 9. After careful analysis of all game events in the source material, it was evident to us that we needed to make decisions about what to include and exclude in our version. Not only as a result of practical constraints in VR development, but also due to the goals we had set for ourselves in our research design.

The main guidelines we set for our adaptation were to exclude sudden scare effects, avoid narrative confusion, and having most of our test participants complete the game scenario in between ten to fifteen minutes.

Locomotion and Level Design for room-scale VR

We chose to design the levels of the game world in such a way that the player would move through the playable VR area with a corresponding one-to-one ratio with their avatar movement in the game world, meaning that the size of the playable VR area correlates exactly with the size of the game world. The simplicity of the level design and architecture in our source material lent itself well for this room-scale VR adaptation, where the game world is confined to the play-area space.

We modified the level design (geometry and size of the corridor) to fit the virtual space in a 3.15m by 3.3m playable area. These measures were chosen because that was the size of our available development space (i.e. our kitchen), and well within the recommended configuration for play-area dimensions by different best practices documentation for developers, as well as the official documentation from HTC Vive setup guide.

We reconfigured the architecture of the game world to fit our needs, and devised our own non-euclidean solution to create the illusion of the virtual space being bigger on the inside. This can be best described as a ‘TARDIS’ effect of sorts.

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Designing without Progression-blocking Puzzles

In level design gating mechanisms are used to control game progression and pacing, giving the player a challenge, or set of challenges, that must be resolved before the next area is unlocked. The original version of P.T. features a series of obscure progression-blocking puzzles that, as revealed by Kojima himself, were meant to confound and stump players in such a way that it would take them “at least a week” to decipher the clues and resolve the challenges.

We decided to avoid using any of the puzzles from the source material as progression blockers in PT VR. since the focus of our study is about how a horror game scenario affects players differently depending on the medium, and not to test the puzzle solving skills of our test participants.

This decision made the experience more accessible to all kinds of players, and it ensured that the majority of participants would complete all nine loops of the game within a reasonable time frame, resulting in more data points for our study.

In order to pace players through the game, we gated progress by player-triggered scripted events. An example of this is the event sequence during loop 3, where the transition-door slams and locks when the player approaches it, and it only opens again after the player walks back to the bathroom door, where the cries of the baby are coming from.

 
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