Abstract
This article focuses on psychological safety while playing XR (VR + AR) games, and the development of safe-guards (‘fuses’) to avoid possible negative impacts incurred during virtual experiences. VR and AR have moved from hi-tech development laboratories and design studios into the homes of otherwise conventional users. XR technology has been repeatedly proven to be beneficial for supportive treatment of phobia, PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), training of complex behaviors in harsh environments, and education related applications.
Gaming applications are in high demand and financially successful, but are insufficiently supervised by professionals with regard to user safety. Immersion and quality of the technology has increased markedly, resulting in the emergence of arenas that look and feel increasingly realistic, and hence can trigger and impact human affectual states, notably fear and sexual pleasure, more easily. The tendency to create super-stimuli is in the minds of the creators with little (we argue: insufficient) regard to deleterious side effects.
Motion sickness has been considered a negative side-effect of VR gaming, but the possible damage to emotional and psychological well-being of users has been overlooked. Other media platforms, such as movies, have documented the impact on the human psyche of pre-disposed individuals, especially when their psychological state is affected by psychoactive substances. We argue the necessity of programming psycho-physiological response-based ‘fuses’ that limit possible negative impacts on individuals with pre-existing or pre-generated conditions.
We do not criticize XR development trends or claim that XR is dangerous outright, and we suspect that various benefits could far outweigh the risks. The warning call we publish here should help establish safety measures while not diminishing the enjoyment during XR gaming.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Martens, M.A., Antley, A., Freeman, D., Slater, M., Harrison, P.J., Tunbridge, E.M.: It feels real: physiological responses to a stressful virtual reality environment and its impact on working memory. J. Psychopharmacol. 33(10), 1264–1273 (2019)
Badia, S.B., et al.: Toward emotionally adaptive virtual reality for mental health applications. IEEE J. Biomed. Health Inform. 23(5), 1877–1887 (2018)
McCarty, R.: The fight-or-flight response: a cornerstone of stress research. In: Stress: Concepts, Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior, pp. 33–37. Academic Press, Cambridge (2016)
Kuhn, M., Johnson, K.: Applied Predictive Modeling. Springer, New York (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6849-3
Murphy, K.P.: Machine Learning. A Probabilistic Perspective. MIT Press, Cambridge (2012)
Agresti, A.: An Introduction to Categorical Data Analysis. Wiley, Hoboken (2019)
Roelofs, K.: Freeze for action: neurobiological mechanisms in animal and human freezing. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. B Biol. Sci. 372(1718), 201–206 (2017)
Holly, J., Bridgewater, C., Lambert, A.M.: The use of virtual reality as a treatment medium for autonomic dysfunction across three diagnostic groups: Case studies. In: 2017 International Conference on Virtual Rehabilitation (ICVR), pp. 1–3. IEEE (2017)
Widdowson, C., et al.: Virtual reality applications in assessing the effect of anxiety on sensorimotor integration in human postural control. In: 2016 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), pp. 33–36. IEEE (2016)
Carver, C.S., White, T.L.: Behavioral inhibition, behavioral activation, and affective responses to impending reward and punishment: the BIS/BAS scales. J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 67(2), 319 (1994)
Singh, A.K., et al.: Visual appearance modulates prediction error in virtual reality. IEEE Access 6, 24617–24624 (2018)
Wilhelm, F.H., Pfaltz, M.C., Gross, J.J., Mauss, I.B., Kim, S.I., Wiederhold, B.K.: Mechanisms of virtual reality exposure therapy: the role of the behavioral activation and behavioral inhibition systems. Appl. Psychophysiol. Biofeedback 30(3), 271–284 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10484-005-6383-1
Cacioppo, J.T., Berntson, G.G., Larsen, J.T., Poehlmann, K.M., Ito, T.A.: The psychophysiology of emotion. In: Handbook of Emotions, vol. 2, pp. 173–191 (2000)
Storbeck, J., Clore, G.L.: Affective arousal as information: how affective arousal influences judgments, learning, and memory. Soc. Personal. Psychol. Compass 2(5), 1824–1843 (2008)
Brenner, S.L., Beauchaine, T.P., Sylvers, P.D.: A comparison of psychophysiological and self-report measures of BAS and BIS activation. Psychophysiology 42(1), 108–115 (2005)
Russell, P.S., Giner-Sorolla, R.: Bodily moral disgust: what it is, how it is different from anger, and why it is an unreasoned emotion. Psychol. Bull. 139(2), 328 (2013)
Tsai, C.F., Yeh, S.C., Huang, Y., Wu, Z., Cui, J., Zheng, L.: The effect of augmented reality and virtual reality on inducing anxiety for exposure therapy: a comparison using heart rate variability. J. Healthc. Eng. 2018, 8 (2018)
Gigerenzer, G., Krauss, S., Vitouch, O.: The null ritual. In: The Sage Handbook of Quantitative Methodology for the Social Sciences, pp. 391–408 (2004)
Spiegelhalter, D.: The Art of Statistics. Learning from Data. Penguin Random House, New York (2019)
Games
Return to Wolfenstein. Activision (2001)
Postal 2. Running with Scissors (2003)
Manhunt 2. Rockstar Games (2007)
RapeLay. Illusion Soft (2006)
Silent Hill: Homecoming. Double Helix Games (2008)
Hatred. Destructive Creations (2015)
Agony. Man Mind Studio (2018)
Acknowledgements
JB & DR are funded by the Czech Science Foundation (Grant No. 19-12885Y “Behavioral and Psycho-Physiological Response on Ambivalent Visual and Auditory Stimuli Presentation”) and DR is further funded by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, Czech Republic and the Institutional Support for Long-term Development of Research Organizations, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Czech Republic (Grant PROGRES Q21 “Text and Image in Phenomenology and Semiotics”).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Binter, J., Říha, D., Prossinger, H. (2020). A Warning: Potential Damages Induced by Playing XR Games. In: Fang, X. (eds) HCI in Games. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12211. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50164-8_18
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50164-8_18
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-50163-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-50164-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)