The Impact of Indirect Social Gaze in Competitive Multiplayer Games

Background. Eye-tracking has increasingly been used in games to enhance the experience and make them more accessible to a wider audience. The technology has also previously been found to give a higher sense of social presence and immersion. Objectives. The objective of this study is to review indirect social gaze and its impact on social presence, immersion and problem-solving in a competitive, multiplayer game. In this case, the game was a version of Memory. Methods. An experiment was conducted that had 28 participants. To collect the necessary data a multiplayer game was created using the game engine Unity and the Tobii Unity SDK. The game was used to collect in-game data and separate questionnaires were created and used to collect qualitative answers regarding the participants' game experience and preferred input. During the experiments, participants got to play three different versions of the game using gaze control with blinks, gaze control without blinks and mouse control in varying order to give feedback on all versions of the game. Results. The collected results from the experiment show that indirect social gaze seems to be beneficial in terms of social presence and immersion but worse compared to mouse control in terms of problem-solving. These results found statistical significance in a subset of the data. Conclusions. While limited to a specific group of people specifically young adults with an academic background, the study has found that by simply using a small subset of the functionality that an eye tracker can bring, positive effects on social presence and immersion can be found. Gaze control in terms of problem-solving, however, seems to fit better in some game genres than others and the first person controls in this experiment performed the best using mouse control when reviewing problem-solving