From Video Games to Virtual Reality (and Back): Introducing HACS (Historical-Analytical Comparative System) for the Documentation of Experiential Configurations in Gaming History

The paper introduces HACS (Historical-Analytical Comparative System), a comparative framework for documenting how video game experiences model human agency across the medium's history. Its motivation is the recurring cycle of enthusiasm surrounding virtual reality, illustrated by press coverage from 2015 and 2016 and by earlier commentary such as Wilson's 1990 remarks, which show how supposedly novel interaction ideas have repeatedly resurfaced. The authors contend that existing analytical tools fall into two unsatisfactory extremes: broad conceptual frameworks that lack the resolution needed for comparison, and highly granular genre ontologies or mechanic taxonomies that become unwieldy when applied to hundreds of titles. HACS is positioned as a middle path, organized around ten "interactive figures," such as navigation, neutralisation, and resource management, that describe recurring forms of player action.

The system operates through layered analysis. A manipulation interface typology distinguishes corporeal, techno-mimetic, generic, and screen-augmented control schemes, drawing on critiques of the "transparency fallacy" in which interfaces are assumed to disappear into experience. A mapping typology then classifies how physical inputs correspond to virtual actions, ranging from symbiotic and metonymic to synchronic, cumulative, and punctual relations. The authors argue that the historical trajectory has generally moved toward input augmentation and symbolic rather than fully isomorphic mapping. A feedback layer separates diegetic feedback, which shows information within the gameworld, from signaletic feedback, which tells the player through conventional indicators, and incorporates progression, failure, and score markers. Five modes of ludic engagement, actualization, execution, tactical coordination, resolution, and strategy, classify challenges by planning horizon and by whether elements are static or dynamic.

The authors conclude that HACS can reveal which player competencies games treat as essential to winning and can document the gradual hybridization of genres, such as platformers adopting character development systems. They acknowledge notable limitations: it cannot fully capture mechanical granularity or challenge quantity, it deliberately omits visual categories such as 2D versus 3D to avoid visuocentrism, and it does not yet represent multi-agent or commandeering experiences. Proposed remedies include drawing on average playtime data and specifying whether agency is singular, a party, or collective. The framework is th