Exploring affection-oriented virtual pet game design strategies in VR attachment, motivations and expectations of users of pet games

摘要

Pets in real life and pets in virtual worlds play two different roles in a human's life. To date, the relationships between humans and virtual pets, especially in virtual reality environments (VRE), remain uninvestigated and relatively unexploited in designing virtual pet games. This paper examines the perceptions, motivations and expectations of people who play games involving pets, and how emotional connection with real pets affect their expectation for pets in VREs. To investigate this, we analyzed data collected from (i) an online survey of 774 people and (ii) observations and interviews with 30 people who played VR pet games in a lab study. Differences in perception, motivation and expectation in virtual reality pet games were found between players who have pets or do not. These findings deepen our understanding of the formation of emotion connections in VREs and provide a basis for studying individual differences in emotion in virtual pet games.