The research team, Alonso Eduardo Veloz Arce and Mauricio Pérez Moreno, built their investigation on a hybrid analytical model that fuses two influential frameworks from game design theory. The first, known as MDA for Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics, treats games as systems in which rules generate emergent behaviors that in turn produce emotional responses in players. The second, DDE for Design, Dynamics, and Experience, extends this view by treating the player’s journey as a temporal process that integrates sensory perception, cognition, and emotion, not just feeling. By combining them, the researchers created a four-dimensional lens covering player agency, immersion and role projection, sensory engagement, and emotional impact, with a cross-cutting category they call perceived interactional accessibility.

That last term deserves careful definition, because the researchers are explicit that it is not the same as game accessibility in the established sense, which refers to removing barriers for players with physical, sensory, motor, or cognitive disabilities. Instead, perceived interactional accessibility describes a player’s subjective sense of how readily the gameplay experience can be entered and understood through clarity of mechanics, objectives, environmental guidance, and system feedback. It is also distinct from usability, learning curves, or cognitive load, though it touches on all of them. The authors position it as an interpretive category within player experience rather than a psychometric measure, a distinction that matters for how the findings should be read.

To test the model empirically, the team recruited 31 adult gamers in Guayaquil, Ecuador, aged between 18 and 31, with a mean age of about 20.5 years. Twenty-six participants were male and five were female, and the group self-classified as either mid-core or hard-core gamers, categories the researchers used as recruitment criteria rather than formal psychometric labels. Because the study was exploratory, participants did not all play every title. Instead, partially overlapping subsamples took part in supervised gameplay sessions: 19 players evaluated Astro Bot, 19 evaluated Helldivers 2, 17 evaluated Hi-Fi Rush, and 11 evaluated The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Each session lasted roughly 30 to 45 minutes and was followed by a structured assessment questionnaire tailored to the game while preserving the same four analytical dimensions.

The four games were chosen through intentional sampling based on recognition at The Game Awards for 2023 and 2024, and they represent strikingly different interaction structures. Astro Bot is a platformer built on exploration, power-ups, environmental guidance, and haptic feedback through the DualSense controller. Helldivers 2 is a cooperative third-person shooter organized around shared limited lives, dynamic difficulty, and team coordination. Hi-Fi Rush fuses platforming and action combat with rhythm-based mechanics and continuous musical synchronization. Tears of the Kingdom offers an open world centered on exploration, environmental physics, resource management, and abilities such as Ultrahand, Fuse, Ascend, and Recall. This diversity allowed the researchers to compare how aesthetic experience emerges under very different design conditions.

The quantitative results revealed distinct patterns for each title. In Astro Bot, 84 percent of participants, 16 of 19, associated the game’s limited narrative focus with easier entry into the gameplay experience, suggesting that reducing interpretive demands can strengthen player agency and initial engagement. In Helldivers 2, 84 percent valued the shared-lives system as a source of challenge, and 74 percent associated gameplay with cooperative dynamics, pointing to social interaction and collective risk as engines of emotional engagement. In Hi-Fi Rush, the picture was more ambivalent: 59 percent expressed dissatisfaction with the tutorial, yet 88 percent considered musical feedback essential to the experience. And in Tears of the Kingdom, 45 percent reported interruptions in gameplay flow, mostly during exploration and climbing, while 73 percent identified joy, satisfaction, discovery, and accomplishment as the predominant emotional response.

These patterns led the researchers to a nuanced conclusion about the relationship between sensory polish and ease of understanding. Hi-Fi Rush demonstrates that a game can deliver a powerful audiovisual experience while still creating friction at the point of entry, because the clarity of its interaction systems lagged behind the richness of its sensory design. Conversely, Tears of the Kingdom shows that frustration and flow interruptions do not necessarily diminish the overall evaluation of an experience; instead, obstacles can contribute to a more complex and meaningful aesthetic journey when they coexist with strong positive emotions. The aesthetic experience, in other words, is not a simple pleasure meter but a dynamic interplay of tension, satisfaction, and interpretation.

To contextualize the player data, the team conducted semi-structured interviews with four international experts in video game design and development: Ángel Zurita and Daniel González from Spain, Marco González from Chile, and Vicente Contreras from Mexico. The experts agreed that aesthetics in games should not be reduced to visual components but understood as a holistic experience emerging from the interaction between player and system. They emphasized the importance of sensory feedback, clarity of mechanics, and system coherence, and they highlighted the central design challenge of balancing ease of entry with experiential depth, maintaining the interest of advanced players without excluding less experienced ones. They also noted that frameworks like MDA and DDE are useful analytical tools but must be adapted to each design context.

The authors are careful about the limits of their work. The sample was recruited through non-probability convenience sampling, was predominantly male, excluded casual players, and was drawn from a single city, so the findings should not be generalized to broader gaming populations or other cultural contexts. Participants were not recruited according to disability status, which means the results on perceived interactional accessibility reflect player-centered perceptions of ease of engagement rather than evidence about formal game accessibility. The gameplay sessions captured initial, short-term responses rather than longitudinal changes in mastery, and because the game-specific subsamples overlapped partially, the study emphasizes within-title descriptive interpretation rather than direct statistical comparison between games. No inferential statistics were performed, and the researchers deliberately avoided reliability coefficients like Cronbach’s alpha because their instruments were not psychometric scales.

Despite these constraints, the study offers something genuinely useful: a conceptual and methodological bridge between structural design frameworks and the lived experience of players, tested in a Latin American research context that remains underrepresented in game studies. The authors propose that future work should apply the hybrid MDA–DDE model to larger and more heterogeneous samples, including casual players and participants from different cultural backgrounds, develop standardized instruments for assessing its dimensions, and conduct longitudinal studies tracking how aesthetic experience evolves as players gain mastery. Most importantly, they call for future research to address game accessibility directly by involving players with disabilities, so that the relationship between perceived ease of engagement and the removal of real interactional barriers can be empirically examined. For an industry increasingly invested in inclusive design, understanding how clarity, feedback, and emotion converge into a sense of beauty may prove to be more than an academic exercise.

Subject of Research: Aesthetic experience and perceived interactional accessibility in award-winning video games analyzed with a hybrid MDA–DDE framework

Article Title: Aesthetic experience and perceived interactional accessibility in award-winning video games: a mixed-methods study using MDA–DDE with gamers in Guayaquil, Ecuador

Article References: Veloz Arce, A. E., & Pérez Moreno, M. (2026). Aesthetic experience and perceived interactional accessibility in award-winning video games: a mixed-methods study using MDA–DDE with gamers in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 8, Article 1937926. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2026.1937926

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fhumd.2026.1937926

Keywords: video games, aesthetic experience, MDA framework, DDE framework, player experience, game accessibility, sensory engagement, emotional impact, player agency, immersion, mixed methods, Guayaquil

The research, scheduled for presentation on October 8 at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality in Bari, Italy, is the first to systematically evaluate hallucination awareness cues for embodied conversational agents. These agents are AI-powered systems that go beyond plain text, presenting themselves as graphical characters capable of gestures, facial expressions, and natural speech. They are rapidly appearing in applications from customer service to education, and they inherit a well-known weakness from the generative AI models that power them: a tendency to produce untrue statements, commonly called hallucinations, delivered with the same fluent confidence as accurate information.

In conventional text-based chatbots, the problem of flagging uncertainty has a fairly mature toolkit. Verification systems can check an agent’s statements against trusted sources, and when something looks unreliable, the interface can highlight the relevant words or attach a source link for the user to examine later. Qiao Jin, corresponding author of the paper and an assistant professor of computer science at NC State, notes that these cues are relatively straightforward in text-based conversational interfaces. The challenge, he explains, is far thornier in immersive environments like VR, where conversational agents appear as human-like characters speaking directly to users, and where spoken responses pass by quickly, leaving no persistent trace to highlight or annotate.

To explore how uncertainty might be communicated in this new context, the researchers recruited 24 college students and had each of them interact with a VR system featuring an embodied conversational agent resembling a woman wearing a suit. Participants encountered multiple hallucinated statements under four different experimental conditions. In the first, the agent used embodied cues, making physical gestures associated with the unreliable statement, such as crossing its arms when it was uncertain. In the second, icon cues appeared next to the agent, notifying users that there was additional information they should check about a statement. In the third, text cues were used: every statement the agent made appeared as a subtitle on the screen, and those subtitles could be highlighted in different colors to signal potential uncertainty. The fourth condition served as a control, with no additional cues of any kind.

After each interaction, the team measured how well participants detected hallucinations and gathered detailed feedback through questionnaires and interviews, probing not only whether the warnings were understood but also how much each technique disrupted the participant’s sense of being present in the virtual world. That second dimension matters enormously, because immersion is the entire point of embodied agents. A warning system that constantly yanks users out of the experience defeats the purpose of building lifelike characters in the first place, as Xiaoran Yang, first author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at NC State, emphasizes: the evaluation looked both at which cues were most effective at alerting users to potential hallucinations and at which techniques best preserved the user’s sense of immersion in the VR experience.

The results revealed a genuine trade-off rather than a single winner. All three cue types outperformed the control condition at helping users identify hallucinations, confirming that some form of signaling is far better than silence. But each approach carried distinct strengths and weaknesses. Embodied cues, delivered through the agent’s own body language, were associated with the highest levels of immersion and the highest trust in the agent itself. Users remained inside the fiction of talking to a person, and the character’s gestures felt like a natural extension of human communication. The cost was interpretability: subtle physical signals were harder for participants to decode reliably, meaning some hallucinations slipped past even attentive users.

Text cues sat at the opposite end of the spectrum. By displaying subtitles that could be color-highlighted, the system gave users the clearest possible interpretation of which statements were questionable, making text cues the most effective technique for actually catching hallucinations. Yet this clarity came at a price. Participants reported that reading subtitles distracted them from everything else happening in the virtual environment, pulling their attention away from the agent, the setting, and the flow of conversation. The very mechanism that made the warnings legible also fragmented the immersive experience that embodied agents are designed to create.

Icon cues emerged as a pragmatic middle ground. A small icon appearing beside the agent conveyed more interpretable information than body language alone, while causing less disruption to immersion than a wall of highlighted subtitles. For developers who need a single, balanced solution, this middle path may prove attractive, offering meaningful gains in hallucination detection without the steep immersion penalty of on-screen text or the ambiguity of purely gestural signals.

The implications extend well beyond the laboratory. Educational programs, training simulations, and virtual assistants are among the most promising applications for embodied conversational agents, and these are precisely the contexts where a confidently stated falsehood can do real harm, teaching a student something incorrect or steering a user toward a bad decision. The study’s findings suggest that designers need not choose blindly among warning strategies. By selecting different cues, or combinations of cues, for different contexts, developers can tune the balance between communicative clarity and experiential continuity, improving a system’s ability to communicate clearly and effectively about potential hallucinations while limiting the impact on the user’s experience, as Jin observes.

There is also an important open problem that the researchers themselves flag: culture. Body language is not a universal language, and a gesture that reads as uncertainty in one cultural context may signal respect, deference, or something else entirely in another. Avoiding eye contact, for example, may indicate doubt in one setting but politeness in another. Before embodied cues can be deployed at scale, additional work will be needed to ensure that the body language of these signals can be understood by users from diverse cultural backgrounds. The paper, titled Signals of AI Hallucination: Designing Hallucination-Aware Cues for Embodied Conversational Agents in VR, was co-authored by Yang Zhan, Yuxuan Huang, Yichen Yu, and Noboru Matsuda of NC State, Xie He of Carnegie Mellon University, and Zhuo Wang of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. As generative AI characters step out of the chat box and into our headsets, the question of how they should admit doubt may become one of the defining design challenges of immersive computing.

Subject of Research: Designing hallucination-aware warning cues for embodied conversational AI agents in virtual reality

Article Title: Researchers offer three ways to alert users to AI hallucinations with ‘embodied’ agents

Article References: Researchers offer three ways to alert users to AI hallucinations with ‘embodied’ agents. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: AI hallucinations, embodied conversational agents, virtual reality, human-computer interaction, generative AI, user experience, immersion, verification cues, NC State University, ISMAR, educational technology, uncertainty communication