Believable Status Indication

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about how a player’s status can be displayed in a virtual environment in a believable way.

The indication of a player’s status is a critical design element of many computer games as the information needs to be provided in a clear and easy way without visually irritating the player. Often, this is done using a 2D User Interface (UI) overlay over the actual 3D gameplay that contains bars or numbers expressing a player’s state. This non-diegetic technique, however, negatively affects the overall believability of the simulation as it adds an element to the gameplay that normally would not exist in reality.

In contrast, diegetic UIs embed the information directly into the virtual world thus making it to a part of it and increasing the overall believability. This approach is easy when the computer game simulates a real world activity, such as driving a car, flying an airplane, or operating other machines, that automatically provides a diegetic UI like a cockpit or other control interfaces. In such a case, the status information can be displayed in the same way as in the real world by utilizing the simulated indicators.

However, more creative and sometimes even magic approaches are needed when the game concentrates on the players themselves and lets them experience the virtual world from a first-person perspective. Normally, we have no indication of our current states in the real world aside from our senses. We know how we feel when we are hungry, cold, wet, injured, or happy. Encoding and conveying these feelings in a virtual environment, however, is not straightforward.

Therefore, due to technical limitations, metaphors need to be found that provide us with feedback about the states of our virtual bodies and inform us when we are affected by something. For instance, Stranded Deep indicates a player’s status on a virtual wristwatch the player is wearing. By simply pressing a button, the player’s avatar raises the left arm thus allowing the user to check their health and hunger. Take On Mars puts the players into a spacesuit that displays relevant health information directly into the players helmet like a Heads-Up Display.

This especially is important in the case of a Virtual Reality (VR) simulation that visually immerses the user by utilizing a Head-Mounted Display. In VR, using a diegetic UI is very important as regular 2D overlay UI can cause a high degree of distraction as it would always be in the player’s field of view independent from the player’s gaze.