Where You're Looking, Who You're With and How You Get There: Designing a Virtual Reality Art Game for Inclusion and Emotion

Lemarchand and Campos describe the design of The Meadow, a virtual reality art game developed at the USC Game Innovation Lab, as an alternative to VR projects that simply port conventional screen-based mechanics and genres. Drawing on experiential games, participatory art, live-action roleplaying, and installation design, they argue that experimental approaches yield practical lessons for designers working on VR games for entertainment, social impact, and artistic effect. Work began in August 2014 with an open brief and spanned four semesters, culminating in IndieCade finalist status and an exhibition at the UCLA Game Art Show at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Three design goals structured the project. The first was accessibility. To address simulator sickness, which disproportionately affects women, the designers kept the player stationary and made world events come to the player. They report this eliminated sickness in every player who tested or used the game. To avoid complex controllers that alienate non-console audiences, they adopted gaze control, in which sustained looking at objects changes their state.

The second goal was to honor the transition between real and virtual worlds. The team built a physical installation using set, prop, costume, tactile, and olfactory design along with live actors, employing environmental storytelling to ease players into the virtual narrative from the moment they see the installation. Players anecdotally report deeper emotional engagement as a result. Lemarchand calls this "ambient LARP," an interactive theater mode with a low barrier to entry for shy or socially reticent participants. Team members also "puppeteer" the experience, triggering events via keyboard inputs and tactile props based on where the player is looking, creating narrative coauthorship between player and actors.

The third goal was experiential gameplay, which emphasizes expressive, systemic play over goal-oriented behavior to expand emotional range, strengthen narrative impact, and encourage mindfulness. The authors' backgrounds in traditional goal-driven design create a productive tension that continues to inform development. Evidence is largely anecdotal and experiential, drawn from playtesting and exhibition rather than formal study.