Perceptual Distraction and its Effects on Difficulty and User Experience in Digital Games

Modern video games often feature rich visual worlds, with many aesthetic elements not essential to gameplay. As our brains are limited in capacity, such task-irrelevant elements can increase cognitive load and lead to distraction, which affects working memory - a key cognitive function in gaming. Little is known about which visual characteristics have the potential to distract and what consequences distraction has on player experience. A better understanding of these interactions can advance the design of more enjoyable, engaging, and accessible games. The present thesis therefore aims to uncover the relationship between perceptual distraction, game difficulty, and user experience in digital games, following an interdisciplinary approach.
Three traditional cognitive experiments investigated how basic visual characteristics affect working memory accuracy. Participants were asked to retain and recall an array of black target circles. Compared to trials without distractors, grey circle distractors impaired recall accuracy, whereas other distractor types did not, underscoring the target-distractor similarity account, which states that stimuli that are visually closer to target items are more distracting.
Utilising a custom-designed video game, two subsequent studies revealed that performance gradually decreased as target-distractor similarity in terms of brightness contrast increased. While distractor difficulty per se did not impact player experience, success rates in distractor trials correlated with enjoyment, highlighting the importance of providing adequate challenges and progress feedback in games.
Finally, since individuals differ substantially in cognitive abilities, the effects of game difficulty based on players' working memory capacity and ability to ignore distraction on player experience were studied. Contrary to expectations, personalising difficulty based on individual player skills did not improve player experience.
In sum, these findings emphasise the importance of considering both task-relevant and task-irrelevant visual elements in video game design and suggest a complex interplay between the visual design of game elements, performance and PX.