Toward a Taxonomy of Inventory Systems for Virtual Reality Games
This work addresses the problem of implementing effective inventory systems for VR game developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing game design concepts.
The paper tackled the lack of complex inventory systems in virtual reality games by constructing a first taxonomy of design considerations and building blocks, and evaluated three inventory designs in a qualitative study, revealing promising insights for VR game potential.
Virtual reality (VR) games are gradually becoming more elaborated and feature-rich, but fail to reach the complexity of traditional digital games. One common feature that is used to extend and organize complex gameplay is the in-game inventory, which allows players to obtain and carry new tools and items throughout their journey. However, VR imposes additional requirements and challenges that impede the implementation of this important feature and hinder games to unleash their full potential. Our current work focuses on the design space of inventories in VR games. We introduce this sparsely researched topic by constructing a first taxonomy of the underlying design considerations and building blocks. Furthermore, we present three different inventories that were designed using our taxonomy and evaluate them in an early qualitative study. The results underline the importance of our research and reveal promising insights that show the huge potential for VR games.