Eye-tracking for Sense of Immersion and Linguistic Complexity in the Skyrim Game: Issues and Perspectives

Cierro, Alessandro [UCL] Philippette, Thibault [UCL] François, Thomas [UCL] Nahon, Sébastien [UCL] Watrin, Patrick [UCL]

As part of an experimental study aimed at evaluating the linguistic and paralinguistic factors that can influence the sense of immersion in an open-world video game, we have partially opted for an eye-tracking data collection protocol. In doing so, various problems emerged in the course of the research and we therefore propose to report and analyze them in this article in order to provide useful feedback for further research. The first set of problems is of a technical nature and relates to the difficulty of collecting reliable eye tracking data in an open and complex game environment. Our second concern is about the difficulties that may appear depending on the morphological characteristics of the players. The third issue is about player’s familiarity with the game and the experimental parameters. And lastly, we discuss some post-processing issues for the analysis. The reflections raised from these few difficulties allow us to discuss some challenges for future oculometric research in complex video game environments.