User Experience for Serious Games in Virtual Reality

Great deal of progress has been made in the last few years with Virtual Reality (VR) technology (Bhowmik, Inf Display 33(6):20–32, 2017) as VR headsets of different complexity are now available to the general public and are used for more than just games. Today’s use cases for VR are many, owing to the ability to generate and immerse people in a variety of different virtual worlds and environments (Berg and Vance, Virtual Real 21(1):1–17, 2017). These virtual worlds replicate or even enhance the real world (Velev and Zlateva, Int J Learn Teach 3(1):33–37, 2017), hence expanding the prospects and market for VR. Each year, the number of individuals purchasing immersive technology grows, and by the end of 2024, it is estimated that VR will generate around 12.19 billion dollars in revenue worldwide (Alsop: Consumer and Enterprise VR Revenue Worldwide 2024, 2021). Further, predictions for the foreseeable future imply that such numbers will only rise. Even though most of its current popularity can be connected to the VR gaming industry, still, VR technology can be found and used in many other aspects. It can be used for a range of fields (Bastug et al., IEEE Commun Mag 55(6):110–117, 2017), including but not limited to education, sports, training, tourism, simulators, big data visualization, health care issues, and more. As a result, the purpose of the VR application in those fields is not the game itself but rather including game-design principles in a nongame context (Werbach and Hunter: For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business. Wharton Digital Press, Philadelphia, 2012). This means it is not primarily intended for entertainment, leading to those games being referred to as serious games (Deterding et al.: Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments, pp. 9–15. ACM, 2011).

The so-called second wave of VR has brought to research and market a lot of new displays, input devices, and content solutions during the last few years. Not only has new hardware entered the consumer market with low-cost price patterns, but whole new technologies are also being designed and developed.

The methodology that was used for this research is presented in the overview based on the selected influencing subfactors and related research questions that have been the main focus of this work. As part of it, several different VR applications, each centered on a different set of features, were developed with the goal of investigating UX in VR serious gaming through empirical investigations done in a laboratory.

This chapter aims to investigate and comprehend which technological factors and in what way they can influence the user experience. Because of the fact that HMDs are now the most extensively used VR devices on the market and that the research took place in the laboratory, the emphasis of this chapter is centered on two subcategories: device-related system IFs and network-related system IFs.

This chapter aims to investigate how serious games’ content for VR technology influences UX. Content is a subfactor of the System IFs, and in the current overview for VR services, it is not included as a separate category but as a subcategory. Although Content is still considered a component of System IF, in gaming, it is further subdivided into Narrative, User Representation, Environment Design, and Supported Interactions. Such elements may also influence the experience of serious games in VR, which is what this chapter wants to investigate.

This chapter intends to study context settings in which VR serious games may be used, as well as the effects on users that such a VR setup can have. Because this research is based on lab-based research, most subfactors are treated as controlled variables because of the limits of in-lab research and ethical approaches to user studies. As a result, the importance of social factors was emphasized in this work.

This chapter focuses on users engaged in a VR serious game and how various user attributes might impact UX. Because this study relies on questionnaires for assessment, physiological measures were excluded. As a result, demographic questionnaires were employed in all studies. Furthermore, immersion tendency and simulator sickness were not assessed for all conditions but were regulated throughout the tests. Age and gender (RQ4.1) were particularly highlighted as demographic factors, as was a prior experience with VR (RQ4.2). This study examined how users of various ages, genders, and levels of experience perceive the user experience in VR serious games.