¿Existe influencia del sistema verbal en la 'jugabilidad' de un videojuego?: Registro de movimientos oculares con eye tracker

Abstract

Influence of the Spanish verbal system on ‘gameplay’ in videogames: Eye-movement recording with eye tracker. The goal of this article is to determine how the ‘gameplay’ of a group of gamers is influenced by their level of attention to the verbal system in a first-person shooter videogame. To that end, the term videogame is conceptualized as a macrogenre constituted by distinctive features which are grouped in three interacting components: computational, game activity and multimodal or multisemiotic. Among its genres, the first-person shooter can be found. This genre is characterized by a high level of attention required in the center of the screen in light of the object manipulated in that area and a high number of stimuli generated by the visual system. In this study, 29 participants played a muted segment of the videogame Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Infinity Ward, 2009), in which two types of messages appear: ‘warnings’ and ‘orders’. Gamers’ attention to the messages was recorded by an eye tracking system, while their performance was measured by a simple counting of deaths during their ‘gameplay’. The results suggest that there is no positive correlation between attention to the verbal system and performance; in other words, the attention to the verbal system is not conducive to a better performance. Moreover, when gamers attend to two systems that are perceived by the same input (in this case, visual input), they split their attention and choose the action. It remains unknown what would occur with the sound activated.