Gameplay experience in a gaze interaction game

Jönsson (2005) compared eye and mouse control as input for two three-dimensional (3D) computer games and found that gaze control was more accurate, game experience was perceived as subjectively more enjoyable and committing. Smith and Graham (2006) studied eye-based input for several game types, with principally 3D navigation. Their results show that participants felt more immersed when using the eye tracker as a gaming input device. Kenny et al. (2005) developed a first-person shooter (FPS) game that logs eye tracking data, video data and game internal data, which were correlated with each other. They found that players fixate the center of the screen for a majority of the time. Isokoski et al. (2007; 2006) describe the advantage of gaze pointing in FPS games as aligning the camera (view frustum of the player) to the target becomes obsolete, when aiming is decoupled from view. Their results indicate that gaze input for FPS games can compete with “killing efficiency” of gamepad input, but leads to more ammunition used due to problems of targeting accuracy. Thus, the game developed for this study was focusing solely on navigational challenges using gaze as input to a 3D FPS, allowing us to assess gameplay experience with subjective questionnaires for this novel input modality.